Back to search

FRIHUMSAM-Fri prosj.st. hum og sam

In 2016 - How it felt to live in the Arab World five years after the "Arab Spring"

Alternative title: I 2016 - Hvordan det føltes å leve i den Arabiske verden fem år etter den "Arabiske våren"

Awarded: NOK 7.4 mill.

Much has been written about democracy (or the lack of it), political Islam and violence in the Middle East after the 'Arab Spring.' But how do these aspects relate to the realities of everyday life in the post-'Arab Spring' world? And aren't there many other matters that are much more important to 'ordinary' Arabs than these three catchwords of western media coverage? The "In 2016" project provides an 'encyclopedia of 2016' that enables users, in a snapshot portrait of one year, to 'jump right into' and move around (via cross-references) in post-'Arab Spring' realities; a tool that allows readers to approximate the experience of 'how it felt' to live in the Arab World in this period of transition and historic change. The source material that has been processed for the 2016 'encyclopedia' pertains to, mainly, three key fields of cultural production: literature, film and social media. These were chosen because topical issues and 'the meaning of life' are regularly discussed in them and they are the best source from which to collect reflections of bodily experiences, emotions and affects. This is relevant for the methodological approach the project was built on, the method applied by Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht in his famous study "In 1926--Living at the Edge of Time" (1997). Like Gumbrecht, also the "In 2016" project group was eager to find what had been "the most frequently observed phenomena and configurations" for Arabs during the target year. There are three categories of such phenomena and configurations: "arrays", "codes" and "collapsed codes". "Arrays" are "artifacts, roles, and activities that influence bodies", because they "require the human bodies to enter into specific spatial and functional relations to the everyday-worlds they inhabit." Among the "arrays" that in 2016 mattered most to Egyptians and Tunisians, we found, for instance, the "Dollar Crisis", "Conversions", "Garbage", and "Psychiatrists". In contrast, "codes" are clusters of arrays that coexist and overlap in a space of simultaneity and "tend to generate discourses which transform [their] confusion into [...] alternative options". According to the project's findings, some of the most prominent alternative options for making sense of post-revolutionary everyday worlds were "Hope vs. Hell," "Inferiority vs. Superiority," "Present vs. Past," "Security vs. Fear," and "True vs. False". Taken together, codes and broken codes (where previous alternative options do not make sense anymore) form what one might call the target year's "culture". It is this culture that the 2016 'encyclopedia' enables the reader to move around in.

Prosjektet og dets teori og metode ble presentert på mange internasjonale konferanser osv. Det er kjent nå i relevante kretser, særlig i norden, DE og FR. Hver gang vi presenterte metoden og (midlertidige) resultater, møtte vi stor interesse og applaus. Gumbrechts "one-year snapshot"-metode ble testet og tilpasset en forandret forskningssituasjon: Mens han brukte metoden til å beskrive forhold som lå 70 år tilbake, anvendte vi den på en mye mer aktuell periode. Utfordringene dette bydde på, ble drøftet i kjernegruppen og framstilt suksessivt i noen artikler. De vil også få en systematisk oppsummering i sluttpublikasjonen. Det er vanskelig å forutse i hvilken grad dette vil påvirke måten å forske på. Men foredragene og publikasjonene våre legger i hvert fall til rette for at mediene og forskningen nå har mulighet til å betrakte regionen med andre øyner enn før. Datainnsamling i Researchers' Notebook var suksessfull, og kildematerialet kan nå danne grunnlag til videre forskning.

Through a snapshot-like portrait of one year - 2016 - the project seeks to provide a tool that allows readers to experience 'how it felt' to live in the Arab World in a period of transition and historic change. Taking H. U. Gumbrecht's seminal study "In 1926: Living at the Edge of Time" as its model, the project's major achievement will be an "encyclopedia of 2016" that enables users to 'jump right into' and to move around in post-revolutionary Arab everyday-worlds. In order to achieve its goal, the project focusses on two key areas of cultural production - literature and social media -, where topical issues and 'the meaning of life' are constantly discussed and data on bodily experience, emotions and affects are available. While each participant in the project has an individual research agenda in the field of his/her specialisation, s/he will also contribute to the common project of an 'encyclopedia of 2016' with entries agreed upon in regular team meetings. Selection and limitation of the material will be unavoidable, but at the same time maintain one of the basic ideas of a Gumbrecht'ian synchroneous cut, namely, to let the year 2016 'itself' suggest 'its' material and to let the sources 'speak themselves'. The project deepens our understanding of the contemporary Arab world by enriching current research on the region with an approach that exploits literary and social media sources to focus the Arab human being who is living and 'feeling' the post-revolutionary world of 2016. It uses and processes previously unresearched source material and develops new analytical and hermeneutical categories, in this way contributing to conceptualization in research on the contemporary Arab World. Fieldwork and exchange with related projects and research groups worldwide form an integral part of the approach and ensure international and cross-disciplinary cooperation as well as a constant adjustment of research questions and hypotheses.

Publications from Cristin

Funding scheme:

FRIHUMSAM-Fri prosj.st. hum og sam