The Story of REMENA

REMENA is a two-year project organized by the Middle East Institute at Columbia University, in collaboration with the Columbia Global Centers, the American University of Cairo, the Rabat Social Studies Institute, and the Arab Council for the Social Sciences. It is dedicated to developing guidelines for the conduct of responsible, ethical, and constructive social inquiry, with the dual aim of raising awareness of the structural context of social science research in the region as well as developing responses to improve the quality of that research.

As mentioned in MENA Section Chair Stacey Philbrick Yadav’s announcement in this newsletter, REMENA’s work is being supported by the MENA Section through a Special Project grant from APSA. That grant will underwrite an initiative drawing upon an interdisciplinary team of social scientists from the REMENA network, as well as scholars involved in the APSA MENA Program, with the goal of helping political scientists serving as faculty advisers address the ethical implications of research in the Middle East and North Africa. The animating question of this new collaboration is: how should doctoral students and early career scholars be sensitized to the ethical concerns inherent to researching within social communities under duress—for instance, among refugees, in conflict zones, or under political environments of authoritarian rule?

The first workshop, to be held in conjunction with the APSA MENA Program’s workshop in Amman during July 2022, will navigate ethical challenges in designing and conducting research, with a particular emphasis on early career scholars. Some of the questions that we shall pose to our participants include: What do they wish they had known before beginning their research? How well prepared do they feel in confronting the ethical dilemmas of their research? What would they recommend be included in the education and training of the next generation of scholars?

The second workshop, to be held in conjunction with the 2022 APSA annual meeting in Montreal, will bring together PhD candidates anticipating or already conducting fieldwork with experienced faculty researchers and invited Directors of Graduate Studies. The focus will fall upon the advising and mentoring processes that facilitate awareness of ethical obligations in research. The questions we will invoke, among others, include: at what point in graduate training should ethical issues be raised and confronted? And how should senior faculty and advisors – particularly those with little or no research experience in communities under duress – mentor and support their students, and junior colleagues in the MENA, when they face such challenges?

Reports and outputs of these workshops, including recommendations for enhancing attention to ethical responsibilities, will be published in future issues of this newsletter, posted on the REMENA website, broadcast through APSA-sponsored outlets, and in the MENA itself circulated through Al-Fanar, an online newsletter on higher education in the region.

Author: MENA Politics Newsletter, American Political Science Association

This article was published in American Political Science Association, MENA POLITICS Newsletter of the Middle East and North Africa Politics Section of APSA, Vol. 5 Issue 1, Spring 2022.