Studying the 2019 Uprising in Iraq
When deciding to start researching an event, a group, a place, scholars make a countless number of passive decisions that are never truly questioned or examined. The interest for a theme, the design of a research project, the elaboration of research questions, constitute a process that is not always clearly articulated by the researcher, and almost never fully revealed in academic writings. So much is taken for granted, so much is lost in the institutional mechanisms, the academic fields, and the theoretical jargon, that condition the very possibility and practice of research. Recent debates on the relationship between research, space/place, and positionality have enriched the understanding of the political, social, economic, and structural dimensions that shape research, as well as the researchers themselves. Feminist and decolonial scholarship have interrogated the political economy, and the geopolitics of doing research and producing knowledge. In this panel, I want to explore my own experience and trajectory in choosing to research the 2019 Iraqi uprising -Thawra Teshreen-. I want to reflect on, not only what led me to study Thawra Teshreen, and issues of positionality, but also on the theoretical, and methodological choices that I made. I also want to explore the challenges, the limitations, as well as the institutional, and structural dimensions that have shaped the process of researching, and its results. I want to show how the dynamics of the uprising impacted me and the way I decided to theorize about it, and the different ways in which my own personal diasporic background and feminist approach, impacted the research itself and the theory drawn from it.