In thinking through the stark differences in how a research project in Lebanon was received in 2018 versus 2020, this paper seeks to reflect on the fragile relationship between academic researcher and community, on the legitimacy of research in moments of crisis, and on the complexity of pursuing decolonial research in the contemporary West Asia North Africa region.

Lebanon is a small ex-French colony on the Eastern shores of the Mediterranean with an unstable political system, a multicultural confessional scene, and a complex historical formation.Footnote ¹ Through a delicate power balance among its main sectarian groups (including Maronite Christians, Sunni Muslims, and Shiʿi Muslims), it stands as a space of multiple internal and deep inequalities and exclusions across various lines of global divisions. During 2018, I began fieldwork in Lebanon for a project exploring visibly Muslim women's quotidian lived experiences of discrimination across the country's geographic and sectarian divides and through the various spheres of the domestic, the public, work, and the state. The project – whose focus and questions were formulated through prior conversations in the field – sought to explore participants’ identities and subjectivities within and in relation to the post-colonial Lebanese state and as global western modernity's increasingly abjected Others.

Fieldwork initially aimed to include forty to fifty participants over a span of nine to ten months through in-depth interviews and focus groups with photo elicitation. An information sheet was provided to participants, explicitly noting that the project was being conducted as part of doctoral study at the University of Sussex in the UK, and that it was funded through the University of Sussex with fieldwork support from the French Institute for the Near East. The fieldwork was met with much enthusiasm as Lebanese Muslim women actively sought to partake. During the first week alone, I had two unplanned double-interviews where the participant came with a friend, a family member, or an acquaintance extremely excited to join “even if just to listen.” I also had conversations that went on for two or even three hours, despite my efforts to limit interviews to a maximum of one and a half hours out of respect for participants’ time and efforts. I similarly received multiple unsolicited requests from visibly Muslim women via emails and phone asking to take part, often specifically expressing a desire “to share things.” A telling illustration of this excitement was when a gatekeeper informed me, a few weeks into fieldwork, that they had contacted a woman in Beirut's southern suburb for an interview to which she vehemently agreed once the topic was presented. Shortly thereafter, this woman reported back that she had shared the project information with a group of friends (through a WhatsApp group), and five of them quickly asked if they could participate as well. What was planned as one interview with a single source quickly turned into one of the project's multiple unplanned focus groups. Throughout, I foundvisibly Muslim women keen to openly speak and share what were often personal and painful lived experiences.

A little under four months into fieldwork, forty participants had already taken part. Realizing that I would be able to complete data collection much sooner than originally expected and not wanting to collect more than I would be able to analyze within the scope of the project, I became increasingly selective in soliciting participation as I sought a variety of experiences and identity variables. I spent around two additional months in the field. By the end of the sixth month, 88 participants from various socio-economic, geographic, age, sectarian, and political identifications had participated. Many participants requested to remain updated on the project's progress, and expressed that they were awaiting and looking forward to the analysis and outputs.

Ultimately, it became evident that the project touched on what visibly Muslim women considered to be a rather urgent “social problem” in need of increased attention. One participant, for example, explained: “It is really so great that you are doing this project, this [anti-hijab discrimination] is such an important issue that no one is talking about, that we really need to think about very hard and very seriously and I am so happy you are doing this.” Participants frequently stated that the project was addressing key and significant lived challenges and experiences they wanted to talk about. Their position and enthusiasm werecrucial in allowing the project to generate rich and powerful data. Most importantly, it was an essential source of motivation and meaning for myself in pursuing this work. Indeed, the sense that participants wanted the project done – that it addressed problems in their everyday lives – gave me much needed legitimacy, value, and motivation in pursuing it.

Surely, this enthusiasm was not without its complexities and ambivalences. For example, many participants stated that they “trust my profile” to pursue the research project. Inquiring what they meant, the “academic nature” of the project with my status as a PhD student in the UK and affiliation to the American University of Beirut (AUB) appeared to be key factors encouraging confidence. These were, most importantly, compounded by other factors including my gender, ethnicity, educational background, citizenship, religion, social class, and networks. Here, assumptions about legitimate knowledge production from the westernized university and a potent entwined male privilege remained highly problematic and limiting of the project, requiring much reflexivity and care throughout its phases while keeping it restricted in many ways.Footnote ² Ultimately, I occupied a complex insider/outsider positionality that greatly shaped the project and its outputs. Yet, it was work that could be done, and that needed to be done.

In October 2019, Lebanon began to witness an unprecedented socio-political and economic collapse: from currency devaluation and hyperinflation to political deadlock and a deteriorating security situation, the country entered deep crisis that was soon exacerbated by the Covid pandemic and global and regional instabilities. Despite the emergent challenges, I was keen to continue research into the lived experiences of anti-Muslim discrimination and exclusion in the country, analyzing these experiences, and working toward their redress.

In September 2020, I began post-doctoral fieldwork by extending my doctoral work with a focus on semi-rural regions and the impact of the Lebanese diaspora in (re)producing experiences of discrimination across the country's geography. In addition to conducting data collection myself, the project was to be supported by researchers from the communities and regions where they were working to conduct interviews and focus groups. When I began soliciting applications for researchers, I was surprised by the lack of interest and low turnout. Determined that they were to be from the respective regions and communities included in the project, I began contacting colleagues, gatekeepers, and acquaintances asking for recommendations. Most of those I asked turned down my invitation to apply, apologizing and explaining that they did not have the time to commit to “such a project”. After some effort, three researchers were recruited. Their initial task was interviewing around 10-12 participant in each region. Participants were also here to be provided with an information sheet identifying the project as part of post-doctoral research being conducted in affiliation with the American University of Beirut through the Arab Council for Social Sciences and with funding from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Influenced by how my previous fieldwork went, I expected a smooth data collection process that could be completed in a matter of weeks, despite the pandemic and Lebanon's socio-economic crises. I was sorely mistaken.

As fieldwork started, researchers began conveying difficulties in recruitment. I found myself facing similar difficulties. While the pandemic was a factor for some participants, the majority seemed undisturbed by the health situation at a time when Lebanon's Covid infection and death rates were relatively under control, or were only beginning to significantly rise. The key problem with recruitment appeared to lay elsewhere. Inquiring, I was told that people were “tired,” “exhausted,” and did not have the time or energy to participate in “this kind of research.” I sought to be understanding. Yet, with time, I became increasingly concerned.

A key issue appeared to be people's sense of bleakness and their lack of interest, or perhaps ability, to speak of anything other than the country's collapse and their immediate challenges mainly revolving around providing and protecting one's self and family. The socio-economic situation in Lebanon meant that many had rapidly fallen below the poverty line, and that large swathes of the population could no longer provide basic necessities including food, housing, and health. In this sense, questions of discrimination and rights were not participants’ most pressing or immediate concerns, it appeared. For many people in the field, the project was reproached as “useless” and, under the developing circumstances, a “waste of time and effort.”

A second issue, and one that appeared equally if not more important, was the project's association to the “west” and to AUB – an institution that was considered by many to have taken a problematic political role in the recent developments in the country. Indeed, this was explicitly expressed by many participants. In the Bekaa for example, one participant openly raised suspicion, asking the researcher why “a western university and AUB” want to know about the hijab, and wondering if the project was part of the “western assault” on their dress and an attempt to “show Muslims as uncivilized people.” In the North, the researcher was met with surprise and rebuking questions of why “she is helping them” as friends refused to assist in recruitment. Another Lebanese Muslim hijab-wearing woman wondered if the project sought to convince women to remove the hijab when approached for an interview. In affirming that such was not the case, the research team at times succeeded in reassuring participants, and at others failed and was met with intense rejection. Throughout the field, comparisons to the (rejected) “work of NGOs” echoed – with the humanitarian aid sector and NGOs generally appearing as a category that had become synonymous with foreign intelligence agencies, imperialist agendas, and “cultural colonization” for many in Lebanon. Given national happenings, such “intellectual” and “thinking” concerns can only be either delusional or ill-intending, myself as well as the researchers were repeatedly told.

Even when people agreed to participate, most raised pointed questions about the project's funding, its aims, and “who is behind it.” When AUB or the source of funding was identified, skepticism and rejection reigned. For example, one participant said, after the conclusion of the interview, that she “does not like the topic,” asking that we “find another issue to research.” When the researcher asked why, she replied: “why ask questions about such things, it is a sensitive matter? Just leave it be.” Similarly, the researcher from the South's notes during a double-interview near the town of Nabatiyeh record one interviewee exclaiming:

The researcher is a hijab-wearing young woman who is herself from the South and who shares her participant's religion, sectarian identification, geographic belonging, and even social class. This did not, it appeared, redeem her from strong accusations, accusations that the participant asked be conveyed and retold. Trying to explain to the participant that this is not the aim of the research, and that she herself shares these positions and experiences, she was met with immediate dismissal and an argument from the participant that “they think they are fooling us by bringing someone from here, but they are not.” The suspicion was fixed, even for the participant who was willing to contribute to the project.

Further, interviews were unexpectedly brief. The interview guide aimed at one hour to one and a half hours of conversation. I anticipated at least some participants to push the conversation beyond this, based on my earlier fieldwork. I was surprised to find that the first interview did not go beyond half an hour, with the participant's “unwillingness to discuss” – as the researcher expressed – making any further conversation impossible. As the interviews began slowly building-up, they rarely exceeded one hour. Multiple interviews did not exceed 30 minutes. Some of the researchers began scheduling double-interviews. Having two participants together, mostly from the same family, stretched some interviews to 1 hour and 15 minutes. Never was this surpassed. Throughout, participants appeared uninterested as well as tired. Further, as both I and the researchers noted, participants visibly shifted their demeanor and comportment once the recording had been turned on, especially in terms of their tone that turned both formal and guarded. Many labored to present a specific image of the situation in the country, offering calculated answers and comments. The contrast with my fieldwork during 2018 was astonishing. These various limitations and challenges persisted through the project's end in 2021 as Lebanon continued its collapse.

From a relatively stable country with a well-functioning economy and much privilege to a failed state with a collapsed economy, political system, and social order, Lebanon's rapidly changed conditions greatly impacted my efforts at fieldwork and data collection. Surely, this was structured by various factors given multiple differences between the two fieldworks. Nevertheless, I contend here that key among these factors is a climate of exhaustion and fear that had come to govern the country. Alongside this, the westernized university's long history of active complicity and labor at the service of global empire, as well as wider ongoing imperialism, powerfully loomed.Footnote ³ In this, not only was my ability to conduct research severely diminished, but I also went from being welcomed and perceived as working on an important topic to being thought of as aloof from people's concerns, at best, and as a threat and “native informant” at worst.

As someone who sought research as a way to make visible the problems of those on the darker side of western modernity, being perceived as an agent of empire is a sorry prospect. For someone who understood the legitimacy of their research and work as coming from participants, being rejected and transformed into an object of suspicion in the field had a colossal impact on my research as well as my self. Indeed, I began this project aligned with the position that research needs to orient itself to the challenges faced by Eurocentric modernity's Others, and to labor against their aggression and erasure. While the project appeared to me as one that does so, my encounters in the field raised considerable doubts. This significantly raises the question of the fragility of research, researchers, and the researcher–participant relationship within the contemporary condition. Indeed, this shows how a research community's relation to a research project is contingent, highly dependent on context, and dangerously precarious.

Thinking retrospectively of the experiences encountered throughout this project, two entwined questions, among many others, can be here raised. The first is: what research can/should be done in times of socio-economic crisis? The second is: what if the community rejects a research project and what does this mean for the legitimacy of the work being done?

From critical, participatory, and decolonial perspectives, research seeks to listen, to voice, the subalternized's lived and experienced reality of their problems as the attempt to make “visible the invisible” through an exercise of engagement with the “invisible” people themselves where their experiences, their lived being, is the site from which the social world can be understood and challenged.Footnote ⁴ In this sense, the decolonial invitation is to pursue work which “shifts the politics of knowledge toward problems and questions that are hidden by the rhetoric of modernity” as experiences by those on the darker side of its global order.Footnote ⁵ These problems are, surely, multiple, heterogenous, complex, and in constant flux as well as entangled and intersecting. Within this pursuit to examine challenges, issues, and problems, prescriptive and acquired factors including material and identitarian concerns demand significant reflection. Either way, it is key not to erase the role (and value) of the researcher's presence and contributions or fall into any assumptions of monopolies over knowledge-making.Footnote ⁶ A community's rejection of particular questions, and of academic researchers situated in particular ways, must not be taken for face value or as unproblematically conclusive. Indeed, as these experiences indicate, such a rejection must be understood contextually as situated within the specific conditions of its case and moment. Yet, research cannot push forward while it receives suspicion and rebuff from the community alongside whom it seeks to think.

One possible way beyond this impasse would be a sustained conversation between researchers and the community before a project is continued and with each potential participant before they contribute to the project – or decide whether to contribute or not. By engaging in a deliberative dialogue with community members around the project, its questions, its orientation, its horizons, and its contributions, the researcher could both work towards an informed decision on the project's alignment with the community's concerns and needs addressing misunderstandings and misconceptions as well as shape and reshape the project itself. Indeed, as community members develop a better understanding of the project and its researchers, an understanding that goes well beyond what an information sheet and a few institutionally ordained introductory lines can offer, they themselves would be able to take a more informed position in relation to the project and better advise the researcher as to its worth and value from their own standpoints. Through such exercises, a decision on whether to pursue the project or abandon it could be made, as critical, decolonial, and indigenous scholars have argued.Footnote ⁷ If a particular community continues to reject a specific research project having engaged in a conversation around it, I contend that such research should not be pursued.

Yet, even if the project finds sufficient ground to be pursued, this remains a complex process that potentially raises more questions than it answers. From the commitment, effort, and labor it asks of participants to the added burden and complexity of pursuing the project for the researchers themselves, its limitations are indeed multiple and its ethics ambivalent. Most crucially, the modern power differential between the academic researcher and the community – especially in the Global South – looms large in limiting such an exercise and its generative promise. Particularly given the compounding and exacerbating crises across the so-called Middle East North Africa region, this highlights the need to push forward the conversation around critical decolonial research and methodologies in the region and the possibilities and impossibilities of and for academic research, where research project and questions can or cannot emerge from, and what they could or could not revolve around and address.