Listening in Arabic

Abstract

This article reflects upon three developments emergent from a feminist approach in research with Syrian newcomer mothers in Toronto, Canada. First, a feminist approach shapes how the authors build their research team and facilitate internal meetings as a diverse, multigenerational group open to learning from others. Second, a feminist approach requires that the authors center mothers’ words through the critical practice of ensuring shared Arabic language and local knowledge in the research process. The authors offer excerpts in Arabic and English from participants’ narratives to describe how giving nuance to multiple forms of expression is key to a feminist practice of translation. Third, the authors describe how this approach opens their project to involve a range of participatory-action activities driven by the voices and desires of participants. The authors end by summarizing their ethical and methodological practices in light of inequalities at the intersection of citizenship status, class, nation, race, and other categories of asymmetrical power. These inequalities shape the authors’ attempts to reorganize conventional participant-researcher and student-faculty dynamics in their work together.

(De)constructing Refugee Vulnerability: Overcoming Institutional Barriers to Ethnographic Research With Refugee Communities

“….Further, power relations in the refugee context come dressed up as compassion” (1996, 171). As Razack correctly points out, these relations are steeped in problematic power dynamics haunted by the humanitarian desire to “help.” Writing about a similar study of Syrian refugee mothers in Ontario, Maghbouleh et al (2019) write about the challenges of conducting research with Muslim women from Syria: “our project risked reproducing uncritical, homogenizing, and Orientalist ideas about gender and power, particularly in the context of mothers’ forced migration and resettlement” (2019, 487–488).…”