Where the dust settles: fieldwork, subjectivity and materiality in Cairo

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article uses the very materiality of the city, namely its dust, to reflect on the processes of researching and writing about it. By using ‘dust’ as both a material and an imaginative metaphor that assembles architecture, urban space, archives and history, I argue that field environments, in a very material sense, seep through our fieldwork methodologies. Written through a series of four vignettes; this article reflects on conducting archival fieldwork in urban space, as a non-risky methodology, yet within a politically turbulent context where research in itself could be a cause of risk. By acknowledging the very materiality of the field environment, a space is created to reflect on how the field constitutes our subjectivity as researchers, in the city, the archive, or elsewhere. Attention to dust allows us to write with – rather than against – the entanglement of field notes. It makes space for an autobiographic incision and reclaims a subjective voice that writing on being in the field needs. Furthermore, it allows us to trouble the clean and disentangled constructions of our subjectivity as academic knowing subjects through the orchestrated everyday practices of conducting fieldwork.