Work talk by Farah Hallaba, hosted by Antoinette Ferrand

The project ‘Being Borrowed: On Egyptian Migration to the Gulf’ started as an endeavor to anthropologically understand a personal familial experience. It was made possible through a collaborative encounter of a three-months workshop that produced a multi-media exhibition and a self-published publication that encountered the public. The academic model and its institutionalized process hindered an exploration of the intimate experience of migrating to the Gulf. Thus, we followed this otherwise and elsewhere through a collaborative and creative otherwise. This presentation takes the frame of the encounter seriously, going through the different forms which Being Borrowed as project has taken over its course, each as an encounter or a series of encounters. The project thus invites us to reimagine ethnographic methodology as a public interaction geared towards joint knowledge production.

Short Bio:

Farah obtained her MA in Social Anthropology and Visual Ethnography from University of Kent. She started @anthropology_bel3araby انثروبولوجي بالعربي in 2019, aiming to publicize anthropology in an accessible way and in Arabic. She has been doing short engaging online videos and collaborative workshops since then; mainly Visual Anthropology workshops and Collaborative Anthropology workshops about social class and migration to the Gulf; which produced “Being Borrowed” multi-media Exhibition and Publication, 2022. Farah was a resident teaching fellow at CILAS teaching Ethnographic Studies 2021-2022. She also shares a creative space in downtown Cairo, where she collaborates with artists to offer spaces for creative discussion-based knowledge production.