CCAS Events and Programs Manager, Coco Tait, interviewed our 2024-2025 post doctoral fellows.
Natalie El-Eid
What brought you to be interested in contemporary transnational literature and cultures of the Arab world, and what drove you to pursue an opportunity at Georgetown?
As a Druze Lebanese American who grew up between the U.S. and Lebanon, in many ways my interests in transnational literatures and cultures of the Arab world shaped who I am. I grew up listening to the stories of our pasts and developed a deep love of the diverse and beautiful cultures of the Arab world from a very young age. When I began my graduate career and delved more fully into academic scholarship on the Arab world, I was struck by the scarcity of research on the lives and experiences of contemporary Druze peoples. As one of the only institutions around the world and in the U.S. in particular that supports scholarship on the Druze, finding and pursuing the American Druze Foundation postdoctoral fellowship at the CCAS was thus immensely exciting and rewarding.
Tell me about your dissertation. What research methods did you use? What are the major takeaways you learned while working on your dissertation?
My dissertation, “Transnational Druze and Reincarnation: Remembering, Recording, and Reconnecting,” focuses on the Druzes’ ethnoreligious belief in reincarnation in order to reshape and redefine contemporary understandings of trauma, memory, and gender within and across multiple and overlapping fields of thought. I engaged interdisciplinary and diverse textualizations and representations of Druze reincarnation across film, novels, and self-conducted oral interviews with reincarnated Druze peoples. Curating and examining an archive of Druze reincarnation stories allowed me to explore questions such as: What does it mean to inherit trauma and memory, not only from family or culture, but from a past life? How do the afterlives of traumatic experience continue to shape lives, experiences, memories, histories, (un)official archives, and politics across the contemporary Arab world? What interventions can/do Druze experiences and stories make in individual, national, and global contexts? What future possibilities in seeing, listening to, understanding, and, ultimately, transforming the transnational Arab world are forged when we pay attention to its marginalized voices? By introducing a concept I name as “Druze afterlives,” my research offers new ways of understanding how empire, war, trauma, memory, and gender intersect within and across the borders, bodies, and stories of the transnational Arab world. My key takeaway from this work has been the incredible realization that each one of us is uniquely positioned to offer new ways of understanding and transforming the world around us. Pay attention to the silences. Break them whenever you can. And always remember the power of your own voice.
Many of our students may consider pursuing a PHD at some point in their careers after CCAS. How did a doctorate program support your work and help you shape your career path?
A doctorate program gives you the opportunity to develop an intervention into a field or fields of thought that you find important, exciting, and engaging. For me, studies of the contemporary Arab world at the intersections of trauma, memory, and gender left me wanting to read more about Druze cultures and lives in pages where we often could not be found. Creating scholarship and thus shaping future knowledge and understanding across your fields of interest is something very unique and special about pursuing a doctorate degree. A PhD also affords you the opportunity to teach in institutions of higher education such as Georgetown, which has always been a goal of mine. As a teacher in a university classroom, you share the scholarship that has shaped you, and that perhaps you have also helped shape, with students from diverse backgrounds, positionalities, and interests. I have always believed education is central to growth, liberation, and transformation, and pursuing a PhD has allowed me to receive and share critical knowledge that I believe can and will change our collective future.
How does funding from ADF for this post-doctoral fellowship help you achieve your goals? What do you plan to work on during your fellowship at CCAS?
The ADF postdoctoral fellowship is something I am incredibly grateful for, as it has provided me with time and support for pursuing both my research and teaching goals over the next year. During this time, I plan on developing a book proposal as well as evolving my dissertation into a book manuscript. Having spent the last several years of my life cultivating this research project, I am thrilled by the opportunity to begin sharing it with larger audiences, both academic and non. I am also very excited by the opportunity to design and teach my own course about trauma and memory in the contemporary Arab world. As arguably one of the most politicized, militarized, and, thus, traumatized regions of the globe, my course will examine socio- and geopolitical developments of the 20th century (including but not limited to the Nakba, the Arab-Israeli conflicts, 9/11, and the ongoing War on Terror), in order to better understand how the Arab world today, in particular, the Levant, has become heavily affiliated with notions of war, violence, terrorism, refugeeism, exile, and migration. In doing so, we will examine the major concepts and paradigms informing the fields of Arab, transnational, memory, and trauma studies, drawing critical lines of connection often unmade or unseen between these schools of thought. These interdisciplinary critical theories will be grounded in analyses of various cultural productions that engage articulations of trauma and memory within and across notions of nation, religion, class, and gender in the transnational Arab world.
What is one thing you would like the CCAS community to know about you (whether within or outside of academia)?
I strongly believe what we learn in the classroom can and must be carried beyond the walls of the university. Therefore, my work “outside” of academia is deeply interwoven into my work within the classroom, particularly when it comes to living at the intersections of academic scholarship and activism. I have always been very engaged with community groups within and beyond university campuses that work towards mutual understanding, aid, and commitments to liberation and justice. You can often find me at book talks, teach-ins, film screenings, marches, and other community events that foster these efforts. Or at a cat cafe. Kitties and coffee are also great!
Mariam Taher
What brought you to be interested in security, gender, indigeneities, and processes of racialization? What drove you to pursue an opportunity at Georgetown?
I grew up in Egypt, but then did part of my high school and university education in Europe. Growing up in Egypt, you sort of get used to heavy security presences in your daily life, but then, traveling and coming back throughout my teenage years and early twenties, I would become more aware of soldiers and policemen in Egypt, in daily life. I became curious about: how do people experience such presences? Is there this counterintuitive effect where, because the security presence is so heavy, it somehow becomes invisible or normalized?
When I thought about how and where to study these questions, I decided to look at a place in which processes of securitization were shifting and being newly and differently experienced by the community. I felt that in a place like Cairo, it might be difficult to assess how, for example, someone walking through a busy market area felt about one or several policemen stationed nearby. I imagined, they probably did not notice them. The Siwa Oasis, on the other hand, was at the time undergoing gradual and ongoing processes of securitization. They had not been previously “untouched” by the state but the mode of interaction was changing and security was a key factor in molding this evolving relationship.
So, my starting point was security – or a critical security studies approach. As I engaged with this angle, the other points became relevant, specifically processes of racialization, and their intersections with gender and class, as well as the particularities of this indigenous community in Egypt – one of several.
I was thrilled to come across this post-doctoral opportunity at Georgetown. I am extremely privileged to be surrounded by a community whom I respect and look up to, especially at this time of immense suffering, outrage, frustration. I am lucky to find myself in a place of nurturing through learning that is both critical and caring, and through justice-oriented education and understanding.
Tell me about your dissertation “In the Shadow of Territory: Gendered Mobilities in Siwa, Egypt.” What research methods did you use? What are the major takeaways you learned while working on your dissertation?
I conducted ethnographic fieldwork in the Siwa Oasis using methods of participant-observation, unstructured, open-ended interviews, and oral histories. I also used the concept of mobility as a kind of method and analytical tool. As in, I accompanied my interlocutors in daily life, with a particular focus on how different community members moved through space. My days were soon filled with a lot of household and childcare labor, but also going on regular trips to the garden, packing ourselves into trucks traveling between the town and outlying villages, excursions into the surrounding desert, and travels along the highway to the Mediterranean city of Marsa Matrouh, and sometimes to Alexandria, or Cairo. This methodological and analytical focus on mobility led me to identify how different individuals interacted with and navigated rules surrounding their movement, or mobility regimes. I found that there was an interesting interrelation between the mobility regimes enforced by the community and those enforced by the state. I found these systems sometimes overlapped, and sometimes contradict one another – but they generally centered on heteropatriarchal valuations of propriety, surveillance, protection, and care. And people tended to discuss these written and unwritten rules in terms of suspicion, threat, safety, and security. This eventually lead me to the key takeaway of my thesis, namely the key role of gender in our understandings of security, its relevance across the realms of the Siwan community, the wider Egyptian public, and the state’s visions and practices of securitization, and the different ways in which we can trace throughout processes of territorialization. Gender emerged as a kind of shared language or currency that different people used to navigate their immobility and their interactions with multiple and evolving surveillance techniques in daily life.
Many of our students may consider pursuing a PHD at some point in their careers after CCAS. How did a doctoral program support your work and help you shape your career path?
Let me first say, I am still a freshly minted doctor and not yet quite used to it! I will also add that after my master’s, I moved back to Egypt and worked there for a few years. I wanted to take the time to think through whether I really wanted to pursue a PhD or whether I was considering it just because it was the next rung on the academic ladder. I also wanted to be sure I could find a topic that really interested me, something that I could work on for years to come and that would keep me curious.
I can confirm now that the process has been extremely rewarding (though not without its challenges, of course!). Pursuing my doctorate confirmed to me that I do thrive in academic settings, that I do take pleasure in critically engaging a concept for long periods of time, considering it from different angles and perspectives, and arriving at different answers in classic anthropological fashion.
Even for students unsure about their future trajectories, the PhD opens new doors across academic and non-academic domains. Of course, it is worth considering what you are interested in and what this degree adds (or not) in that discipline/ occupation. If you do choose to pursue it, my last piece of advice would be to get yourself into a program that is nurturing for you. I was fortunate to have an excellent advisor and can say – from my own experiences and those of colleagues at different institutions – that this can be the deciding factor in whether students complete the program, whether they feel welcomed, supported, and empowered to enter the academic world.
How does the Qatar post doctoral fellowship help support you in achieving your goals this year? What do you plan to work on during your fellowship at CCAS?
The Qatar post-doctoral fellowship is a huge support to me. It gives me the time and space to further investigate the theoretical foundations of my dissertation. I also intend to prepare and submit at least one piece of writing for peer review and publication (maybe two!).
Moreover, having the opportunity to teach in the spring means that I can explore topics relevant to my work together with a whole room of curious and critical minds. My work centers on an oral ethnolinguistic (Amazigh) minority in Egypt. The course I would like to teach in the spring expands our analytical view to consider different minorities across the region. This includes critical questions such as: How is the category of minority made and by whom? We will look at different processes of minoritization and consider how people experience such processes in daily life. We will ask how categories of race, gender, or class intersect with (or at times define) minoritization; what the historical roots of such processes are in different contexts throughout the SWANA (MENA) region and how they have shifted over time.
What is one thing you would like the CCAS community to know about you?
Having relocated to DC, I am also looking forward to lots of cycling, long walks and maybe some hiking trips. I enjoy running, swimming, and yoga. I am thinking about taking up a self-defense or martial art class. I also miss having pets, so if you wanted to give me some time with your dog or cat, you would be doing us all a favor.
I am really glad to be here, I look forward to meeting each and every one of you – please reach out to me if you want to chat about any of the above! I was very active in solidarity movements in Chicago but I am still finding my footing here – if you would like to go to particular events together, let me know.