feminist activist ethnography through Arabic Twitter: fellowship as a method

Abstract

This article reflects on my journey conducting online ethnography through Iraqi, Saudi, Kuwaiti and Yemeni feminist Twitters as an Iraqi researcher residing in the United Kingdom. It examines the intersection of online ethnography and feminist activism, emphasising the essential role of long-term immersion in social media spaces as an activist prior to undertaking this type of research. I gained crucial insights into the complexity, fluidity and emotional dynamics of online spaces and relationships through years of visible presence and engagement with other activists before conducting my ethnography. While some level of intimacy and affiliation with feminist activists existed, the absence of offline encounters posed challenges to forging friendships; however, this difficulty served as a catalyst for developing an ethical method to navigate relationships with participants and address the limitations of a friendship-based approach. In this article, I propose an alternative approach centred around a fellowship affiliation, approaching other activists as ‘fellows’ in the two Arabic senses of zamāla and rifqa (peer- and comrade-driven) relationships. This shift in the researcher–participant relationship moves away from the intense and demanding nature of the ṣadāqah (friendship) relationship. In doing so, it offers a politically powerful stance and a much-needed critical space for constructive debate while maintaining mutual respect and a shared commitment to the cause. The fellowship-based method necessitates activist transparency and critical allyship dedicated to collaboration and unconventional methods of knowledge co-production, promising solidarity and transcending differences and disagreements. Nonetheless, achieving this can, at times, be challenging. While acknowledging the limitations of the approach, the article recognises that moments of silence or distance can also arise from a sense of activist responsibility and commitment to protecting others.

Introduction

This article reflexively delves into methodological and ethical aspects of my journey conducting feminist ethnography through Iraqi, Kuwaiti, Saudi and Yemeni feminist Twitters, ¹ building on years of activism on social media with a visible identity as an Iraqi woman living and studying in the United Kingdom (UK). My long-term immersion in and interaction with social media served as the cornerstone of my ethnography. Without this experience, conducting research solely within the online realm would have been challenging, if not impossible. I needed extensive time to fully grasp the complexity of online fieldwork, which requires researchers to adapt to its fluidity, agility and messiness (Hine, 2015). Over the years, I became aware of the different emotions that emerge during our encounters with others and the consequent diverse effects. Such experience was vital in enabling me to build rapport and a certain level of affiliation and intimacy with many women activists and feminists, mainly Iraqis, and to acquire a semi-insider status as I entered the field as an ethnographer. Although I use feminism in this article as a broad category that encompasses both self-identified feminists and women’s rights activists, it is crucial to acknowledge that not all women’s rights activists self-identify as feminists (and vice versa), for a variety of reasons. Moreover, following Rosalind Delmad (1994), I understand feminism as more of an intellectual theory, a vision and a field that precedes and may be intertwined with women’s rights activism.

Lisa M. Tillmann-Healy’s (2003) ‘friendship as method’ is a promising methodology that captures the impact of emotions on knowledge production and the researcher–participant relationship beyond the narrow lens of access to a particular group. ² It thus seeks to dismantle the hierarchies between the researcher and participants, highlighting the former’s commitment to ‘research with them [participants], rather than look into their lives from the outside’ (Ellis, 2007, p. 13). For these reasons, the method has been adopted by several scholars conducting offline ethnographies (e.g., Owton and Allen-Collinson, 2014; De Regt, 2015; Ramírez-i-Ollé, 2017; Anctil Avoine, 2022). In offline ethnographies, when we are ‘in the world with others’ (Tillmann-Healy, 2003, p. 732), our emotional encounters can develop friendship relationships between the researcher and the participants. It is through these experiences that we get to know each other more, which is the essence of friendship (Owton and Allen-Collinson, 2014). Although I did not employ this method when I started to conduct my research, I gradually discovered both its potential and the challenges of this approach, the latter primarily being the difficulty of establishing friendships online without an in-person encounter. For several reasons, the absence of an offline dimension undermined the potential of developing the aforementioned affiliation to a friendship relationship. These difficulties included the nature of the online medium itself and the complexity of ṣadāqah (friendship), particularly as I personally understand and experience it through the lens of Arab culture. ³ Retrospectively, however, this was not an obstacle. On the contrary, it helped me to develop an approach whereby I could adhere to the core principles and ethics of a friendship relationship. This approach also involved setting boundaries with others to facilitate critique and constructive debate. In doing so, some of the pitfalls associated with closer relationships with participants were avoided, such as biases and the expectation of agreements or likeness (see Ellis, 2007; Owton and Allen-Collinson, 2014). Drawing on the work of Johanna Söderström, Åkebo and Jarstad (2021), and as my research progressed, I developed what I now term a fellowship-based method. I frame fellowship in two Arabic senses: zamāla (peer-driven relationships) and rifqa (comradeship in the struggle) (Al Jallad, 2018).

I contend that a fellowship-based method addresses some of the limitations of the friendship-based approach (see Tillmann-Healy, 2003; Owton and Allen-Collinson, 2014; De Regt, 2015; Ramírez-i-Ollé, 2017; Anctil Avoine, 2022) by potentially allowing the researcher and the participants to have a critical space for constructive debate. Concurrently, it departs from the close association between ṣadāqah and religion (see Al Jallad, 2018) whilst maintaining mutual respect and a commitment to the feminist activist cause. This method requires activist transparency centred on active participation, engagement and ongoing negotiation with the participants. Additionally, it seeks to build forms of critical allyship (Gates, Bennett and Baines, 2021) through practices orientated towards collaboration with fellow activists based on integrity and rigour. As such, this method offers solidarity with such fellows irrespective of their subjectivities and disagreements. Nevertheless, this potential allyship can be hard to achieve and sustain in an environment where volatile conservative and authoritarian forces collide, endangering the lives of society’s most vulnerable groups. In my feminist ethnography, silence has sometimes become an inevitable choice. Although a limitation of the approach in itself, silence can function as a necessary activist-driven decision to protect the lives of others.

My work contributes to the exciting, emerging literature focused on digital ethnographies (Markham, 2005; Postill and Pink, 2012; Hine, 2015; Wang and Liu, 2021) and their intersection with feminist theories (e.g., Gajjala, 2004; Danley, 2021). A fellowship-based method is guided by the principles of feminist scholarship, particularly postcolonial, decolonial and transnational feminist paradigms (e.g., Liu, Huang and Ma, 2015; Falcón, 2016; Smith, 2021). Such principles allow the researcher to see through the eyes, stories and aspirations of women feminist activists from the four countries in question. Accordingly, alternative means of knowing and understanding are imagined. Reflexivity lies at the heart of this process, as I continuously negotiate my positionality and privilege as a researcher with my fellow female activists (Alcoff, 1991; Gajjala, 2002, 2004; Davis and Craven, 2020). Although my proposed methodology is focused on fieldwork conducted in online spaces, it can be adopted partially or fully in offline ethnographies. However, the challenges and opportunities in both settings can be different. For example, face-to-face encounters make it easier to build trust with participants and to befriend them than in online settings. Nonetheless, it would have been impossible for me to interview women with limited mobility on the ground due to sensitive political situations and socially conservative contexts.

The article proceeds as follows. First, I begin with an overview of my experience as an activist prior to commencing my ethnographic research, reflecting on my positionality and interaction with other activists on Twitter and Clubhouse. ⁴ This section engages with literature focused on the key features and affordances of social media spaces. The second section moves to the online fieldwork, and the blurred boundaries between insider and outsider status. Here, I discuss the fundamental tenets that inform my online ethnography through Twitter, paving the way for proposing fellowship as a method. In the third section, I describe my methodological intervention, defining the method and its characteristics. The fourth and fifth sections illustrate the method’s main dimensions: activist transparency and critical allyship. Both sections provide concrete examples from my research, primarily focusing on the Iraqi case and, to a lesser extent, the Saudi one. In the penultimate section, I acknowledge the limitations of the method, particularly silences, which a sense of activism can paradoxically drive. I conclude the article with further reflection on my research journey so far as I move to Instagram following Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter and the resulting changes to the platform, which, according to initial personal observations, have impacted the visibility of fellow women activists and my connectivity with them.

Entering the field as a scholar-activist

I have used Twitter since 2014 from my diasporic position in the UK. My initial purpose was primarily academic: collecting data related to my academic research about media translation in the context of the terrorist group Islamic State. This objective later shifted when I started to engage in activism through non-academic writing and posting via tweets at crucial sociopolitical junctures in my home country, particularly during the 2018 and 2019 Iraq protest movements. Therefore, I gradually built networks with Iraqi activists inside Iraq or in the diaspora as we individually and/or collectively attempted to document the protests and the security crackdown against the demonstrators. Fortunately, being on Twitter for an extended period has enabled me to establish a salient and transparent identity among feminist and activist communities. My interaction with these communities was the main inspiration for embarking on an online ethnographic activist feminist journey in 2021.

Initially, I did not identify as a feminist (nasawiya) in Arabic. The visibility of my identity and presence as an Iraqi feminist became more potent following, or perhaps in response to, the remarkable participation of Iraqi women from different social and economic backgrounds in the 2019 Tishreen (October) Revolution, the largest social movement in the contemporary history of Iraq. Meanwhile, I immersed myself in what Johnathan C. Flowers (2019) describes as the ‘territories’ of Feminist Twitter, interacting with feminists from Iraq and other countries in the region connected by shared events and experiences, as well as sociality and mobility (see Fay, 2007; Postil and Pink, 2012). Notwithstanding the mediation of the medium and how it dictates the organisation, ranking and visibility of online communities, these territories are organised by ‘similar kinds of affects’ (Flowers, 2019, pp. 1–2) produced by hashtags and, more recently, Twitter Spaces. ⁵ Affects conceptualise the social. They ‘are created and exist within the encounter, while emotions constitute the subjective reaction arising from affects’ (Lilja, 2017, p. 346). Despite this distinction, affects and emotions are intertwined in the process of meaning-making and our social interaction with others (see Tafakori, 2023). Therefore, in line with several scholars (Ahmed, 2014; Åhäll, 2018; Anctil Avoine, 2022), I use affects interchangeably with emotions. What concerns me the most is what emotions can do to bodies in their online circulation and what practices they can create (see Lilja, 2017; Anctil Avoine, 2022). The shared histories and ideologies align certain bodies, including those in the diaspora, with the material space. The latter is akin to what Avtar Brah (1996, cited in Tuzcu, 2016, p. 153) describes as ‘diaspora space’, in which ‘affects of belonging are animated by the sense of being part of a network and one’s movement through interdigitated locations’. Like many women in the diaspora, I could relate to other women’s struggle for equality and social justice.

I have, therefore, broadened my network of activists to include feminists and women’s rights activists from Iraq and other countries in the region. Connecting with other feminists was further facilitated during the COVID-19 global pandemic, when the Clubhouse application ⁶ (a voice-based social media platform) was launched in March 2020, a time when vast numbers of populations were isolated because of the pandemic and the related lockdown measures. When Clubhouse was first launched, its access was limited and invitation-based, allowing only certain groups of people to use it, including politicians, filmmakers, artists and activists (Zhu, 2021). For these reasons, Clubhouse provided a relatively safe space for feminists before it was open to everyone. The application played a crucial role in bringing feminists together, especially when there was a spike in gender-based violence (GBV) globally mainly due to lockdown measures and ‘the increased insecurity and stress the pandemic has inflicted on the society’ (Gemen, 2021). ⁷ I participated in many chat rooms opened and organised by feminist activists from different places in the Middle East and North Africa region. Identifying as a feminist and building a feminist identity on Twitter, and later Clubhouse, was instrumental in connecting and interacting with feminists from the region with a common struggle and shared concerns. Many feminists speaking in Clubhouse chat rooms also had Twitter accounts. Therefore, I could maintain my connection with them on Twitter when the hype around Clubhouse faded (see Boyko and Horbyk, 2022).

During my encounters with other feminists in Clubhouse discussions, different emotions were generated. These are relational and dialectic and share social and political dimensions (Ahmed, 2014; Owton and Allen-Collinson, 2014; Anctil Avoine, 2022). For example, in response to the tragic death of Malak al-Zubaidi, an Iraqi woman from the southern province of Najaf who set herself on fire after being subjected to domestic violence (Aldroubi, 2020), we were collectively angered by the endless cycle of GBV. Further, we were disappointed with the lack of political will and legal regulations to protect women. Crucially, the voice feature of the Clubhouse app gave women with anonymous accounts authenticity, legitimising their cause while also establishing intimacy with others (Radcliffe, 2021).

Additionally, hashtags about domestic abuse were created on Twitter, where women called for the legalisation of the anti-domestic abuse bill in Iraq, expressing their collective anger and sorrow. When affects emerge, they enact politics of care (Tillmann-Healy, 2003; Rentschler, 2017; Anctil Avoine, 2022). Women shared their experiences and validated them through hashtagged tweets and Clubhouse conversations, seeking support and advice from one another. In doing so, we were brought together around a set of common interests, a ‘sense of alliance’ and solidarity (Tillmann-Healy, 2003, p. 371).

Clubhouse and Twitter serve as arenas for debate, disagreements and contestation, not only between feminists and their opponents but also among feminists themselves. We sometimes shared different visions about specific issues or priorities. For instance, sexual freedom was frequently contested, with some activists viewing it as central to women’s emancipation while others dismissing it as unnecessary or problematic at this point in time. For the latter, their logic is that the topic is too sensitive to discuss in their communities and may be counterproductive, further widening the gap between feminists and other women in society. In her research on GBV within the Middle East, Nadje Al-Ali (2019, p. 28) recounts the tensions of working in an activist, feminist environment marked by divided positions and opinions around specific issues, irrespective of the activists’ location, due to the diversity in their ‘experiences, aims and approaches’. In the ‘polyphonic’ social media spaces (Winter and Lavis, 2020, p. 56), polarisation tends to be more severe than in offline communities (Du and Gregory, 2017). A mere clash of distinct opinions can sometimes be inevitable. Online spaces are not detached from emotions, which may not always be positive. More importantly, emotions are ‘mediated’ by social media affordances and practices, which prioritise instantaneous responses and reactions, influencing how users experience them (Papacharissi, 2015; Tafakori, 2021).

Further, posts, including tweets or comments, do not remain static or in a fixed position within feminist territories. They can move outside these territories and enter new ones through the process of sharing and dissemination, where they are assigned new meanings and narratives. For instance, in June 2021, I tweeted about an Iraqi mother from the south who lost her son to militias during the Tishreen Revolution in 2019. I tried to commend her bravery to take to the streets alone to protest, defying the masculine, militarised presence of the security forces, viewing her act through a feminist lens. In my tweet, I linked Um Ihab’s (Ihab’s mother) act of resistance to feminism when I wrote in Arabic:

Whoever hates feminism and considers it an offence, Um Ihab’s act is a feminist act, even if she is unaware of that and even if she is not a feminist. To demand justice and challenge patriarchal authority is a feminist act … A woman’s anger and loud voice are a feminist act, as feminism is, in essence, a cry against injustice. ⁸

Posting the above tweet was an emotional strategy, with the aim of removing the stigma associated with feminism by referring to ordinary women from Iraqi culture and society (see Tafakori, 2021). The tweet went viral, moving beyond Twitter to Facebook when a member of a Facebook page dedicated to misogynistic and anti-feminist discourses and titled ‘Men Without Limits’ took a screenshot of my tweet and then posted it on the page, along with a personal attack directed at me. ⁹ This post depicted me as someone who was ‘exploiting’ the sacrifices of others for personal gains to circulate destructive ideologies. The post opened the door for a torrent of offensive comments that smeared and tarnished my reputation, characterising me as an ‘immoral’ person. The experience was intimidating, especially since many family members, relatives and friends residing in Iraq have Facebook accounts and could have read the offensive post. This example underlines the impact of the embodied dimensions of digital technologies on our understanding of location and belonging. Even though my geographical location is in Britain, I am still materially linked to my home country through online spaces. As a result of this incident, I had to retreat from my social media temporarily.

I decided to reactivate my Twitter account shortly after other Iraqi fellow activists offered support in many ways, including reporting the post or some of the comments to Facebook, or directly contacting the administrator of the page in question to ask that the derogatory post be removed. Although the Facebook post was not deleted, the solidarity of other activists encouraged me to reclaim my voice on Twitter. Their support points to a certain level of intimacy, rapport and ‘affiliation’ beginning to be forged between us (see Weiss, 1998). Such emotions enabled me to have a degree of insiderness in a ‘familiar’ field (Sharp and Dowler, 2011, p. 156) as I shifted to an ethnographer position in January 2022 after securing ethical approval from my institution. This affiliation was not friendship per se. As I understand it through the lens of my cultural background, the concept of friendship is a complicated one that requires several characteristics, including honesty, trust, intense feelings and ‘unlimited commitment’ (Barakat, 1993, p. 19, cited in Al Jallad, 2018, p. 51). These elements of friendship need both time and social activation in the offline world to emerge and strengthen (see Décieux, Heinen and Willems, 2019). Gradually, I could develop some of these characteristics with a small number of activists, who are currently ‘prospective friends’ because our friendship has not yet been socially activated in the offline realm (Chambers, 2013, p. 92). In hindsight, my inability to establish friendships with most feminists helped me overcome the shortcomings associated with befriending informants before or during the research, while allowing me to approach all of them, including prospective friends, as fellows, as I explain later in the article.

A mobile semi-insider in a ‘familiar field’

My online ethnography examines four contexts: Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Yemen. Being an Iraqi woman, a feminist and an Arabic-language native speaker, with a visible activist presence established on Twitter and Clubhouse before embarking on my research journey, has granted me a semi-insider status. Such a status enabled me to access prospective participants quickly, most of whom consented to be interviewed. Nevertheless, in a dynamic and quickly evolving field such as Twitter, it is impossible to be known to all feminists from the above countries. New female activists continually join Twitter, with many using pseudonyms to protect themselves. As I discuss in this article, the case of Saudi Arabia was particularly challenging. Based on my ethnographic observations, most Saudi women activists use private accounts and anonymous identities for protection (see Khalil and Storie, 2021). To many of them, I was an outsider.

As such, the dichotomy between insider and outsider is not clear-cut, especially in the online field (Paechter, 2013). In my case, the fieldwork was not clearly bounded or identified. It resembles what Joanne Sharp and Lorraine Dowler (2011, p. 153) describe as a ‘set of practices, experiences, and emotions’ taking place in specific contexts. In other words, my fieldwork was partly contextual and partly ‘meta’ (Airoldi, 2018), meaning my ethnography methods had to be flexible, mobile and ‘multi-sited’ (Marcus, 1995), taking place through Twitter. Therefore, it distinguishes itself from ‘virtual ethnographies’ undertaken in a specific community or network seen as the online equivalent of physical ‘fieldwork’ (Beneito-Montagut, 2011). I move across various apps and platforms, following diverse individual or collective feminist accounts on Twitter and Instagram. Meanwhile, I use an auto-ethnographic approach to fill in the gaps by reflecting on my personal experience as an Iraqi woman.

This mobility complicates and challenges the insider/outsider binary and raises ethical quandaries concerning the unintentional exploitation of communities and their data (Stacey, 1988), the risks of lurking through mere observations (Morrow, Hawkins and Kern, 2015) and the issue of (mis)representing others’ voices, views and experiences. Other researchers have shared similar concerns related to their position as insider ethnographers who face certain expectations from their community members to be represented in a particular way (Labaree, 2002; Taylor, 2011) and their vulnerability towards social relationships, which may cause them to make compromises or even divulge private information to others (e.g., Humphrey, 2007). To address such risks, researchers who enter the field as insiders must switch to an outsider position at some point, maintaining a physical and emotional distance from the community being examined, the research and the fieldwork (Cuomo and Massaro, 2016). Conversely, outsiders need to ‘go native’ to gain a deeper understanding of the culture and people (Labaree, 2002; Paechter, 2013).

While it was essential to continue to build rapport with potential interviewees and the broader online feminist community on Twitter to gain insights and access to the field and participants, I found it critical to establish a method whereby a distance was in place between myself and other feminists so that disagreement, critique and even judgements were not shunned (see Ferguson, 2010). A space for critique was crucial to prevent biases. Maintaining this delicate balance on a platform as dynamic and chaotic as Twitter required ongoing introspection, reflexivity and negotiation with my participants. When I started my online ethnographic research, I had not yet thought of specific terminology or developed any strategies or parameters. My primary concern was establishing a level of transparency that went beyond revealing my identity and research to women activists or listing certain privileges. This transparency would soon become the pillar of what I now term ‘fellowship as a method’. In the following section, I define the terminology and characteristics of this method before sharing practical examples from my work to discuss its dimensions.

Fellowship as a method

In this article, I employ the concept of fellowship in the two Arabic senses of zamāla and rifqa. The former is closer to fellowship in the sense of a peer-driven relationship. The latter aligns more closely with female comradeship in the struggle towards social justice (Al Jallad, 2018). Fellowship as a method captures both senses. Although it is a variant of a friendship relationship, fellowship remains distinct. Unlike the former, the latter is based on ‘deliberation, mutual recognition and equality’, whereby each legitimises the other as fellows, activists or feminists in my case (Söderström, Åkebo and Jarstad, 2021, p. 498). In using fellowship rather than friendship, I aim to de-associate the fellowship affiliation from specific characteristics found in relationships in the Arab culture, including ṣadāqah (see Al-Kandari Gaither, 2011). These include ‘a strong commitment to religion, loyalty to the group, rejection or hesitance to change … pride in history, nostalgia to the past, and clear recognition of hierarchical order’ (Al Jallad, 2018, pp. 51–52; see Al-Kandari Gaither, 2011). ¹⁰ Moreover, the proposed method aims to overcome the potential pitfalls of expectations, compromises, bias, scrutiny and insider blindness that arise through developing close friendships (see Ellis, 2007).

Fellows do not necessarily have a shared vision. Nor do we have to feel intimate or warm feelings towards each other. This does not mean that a fellowship relationship is affect-free. On the contrary, it is an affective relationship. Nevertheless, it does not prioritise ‘intensity in the interaction’ (Söderström, Åkebo and Jarstad, 2021, p. 498) but instead attempts to nurture collective feelings towards the structural root causes of women’s oppression. As fellows, we are also rafyqāt (female comrades) in our struggle against structural inequalities and patriarchal powers. This Arabic concept is, indeed, being adopted by some Arabic-language feminist platforms and accounts. For instance, the Mauritanian nah.wa wa’iy nasawy (Towards a Feminist Awareness) uses rafyqāt to refer to feminists who are rafyqāt in their shared struggle. ¹¹ This sense entails some of the principles of friendship, including the crucial values of ‘moral obligation’, ‘cooperation’ and ‘non-domination’, which Söderström, Åkebo and Jarstad (2021, p. 498) associate primarily with friends, not fellows.

Fellow comrades ally during times of collective resistance and mobilisation, while at the same time guarding themselves against merging their experiences into a homogenous narrative (Owton and Allen-Collinson, 2014). Boundaries between people need to be kept through sustaining ‘the mutual otherness’ (Frank, 2004, cited in ibid., p. 297), which is also essential to overcome the difficulty of reconciling the diverse identities of the researcher and their ‘acquaintance’ participants during interviews in ethnographic settings (Garton and Copland, 2010, p. 545). Eventually, there is no neutrality of bodies as they encounter one another in research processes. Bodily encounters are ‘deeply political … [and] do not occur in a political and social vacuum: they happen in a society where bodies are hierarchised by markers of gender, race and class’ (Anctil Avoine, 2022, p. 12). Put simply, as researchers, we must always think of unusual and non-traditional methods to explore our privilege and constantly ‘examine, scrutinise, and critique ourselves’ through ‘radical reflexivity’ (Tillmann-Healy, 2003, pp. 740–741).

Acknowledging our privileged positionalities is not a mere list of these privileges. It is an ongoing process that demands constant honest and thoughtful communication with the self and the other (Ghabra, 2015). Communicating with our communities would allow them to make informed decisions, not only about participating in our research but also about voicing their opinions more freely. A fellowship-based method would help sustain the space required for a critical and nuanced discussion. This then opens up new opportunities for collaboration, while adhering to the principles of solidarity with other fellow activists with whom we may disagree. This can be achieved first and foremost through activist transparency, which is the focus of the following section.

Activist transparency

Activist transparency creates a commitment to respectful, responsible and active online participation and engagement with others. As I demonstrate later, it importantly allows researchers to discover means for possible collaboration with fellow feminists. The activist and participatory element in activist transparency refers to the researcher’s interaction with other activists and engagement in the public ‘local discourse’ (Danley, 2021, p. 408) while ‘being open, frank [and] candid’ (Baltzersen, 2010, p. 792). I frequently tweet about my research in the Arabic language, negotiate some of the methodological and ethical dilemmas with other feminists and summarise other English-language feminist scholarship through translation, inviting others to share their thoughts and comments.

As mentioned earlier, through activist transparency, the research becomes more accessible and transparent, allowing the prospective participants to make informed decisions about whether to participate in our research (Danley, 2021). Such decisions may not be straightforward, requiring thoughtful (re)consideration and negotiation between the researcher and potential interviewees. When I approached prospective Saudi interviewees, they were initially happy to be interviewed online. However, after careful reflection and consultation with the ethics committee, I made the conscious decision not to interview any Saudi women activists, given the politically sensitive situation in the country and the potential risks involved in online interviews.

A fellowship method is an ethically responsible methodology that prioritises the safety of the participants and the researcher. I had honest informal conversations with potential Saudi informants to explain my decision and seek better, safer alternatives. I understood that many activists would favour a questionnaire for its anonymity. Therefore, a qualitative questionnaire was a compromised solution to mitigate any risks resulting from recorded online interviews. ¹² I could eventually share the questionnaire with five Saudi feminists only through an anonymous link by email. Even those who initially agreed to participate in my research later hesitated and did not respond to my emails or messages inviting them to take part in the questionnaire. My status as an outsider for Saudi feminists, coupled with the sensitive political situation in their country, could have impacted their decision.

Activist transparency has a degree of reciprocity with the goal of co-producing ‘situated’ knowledge (Haraway, 1991) and ‘a respectful framework within which to frame, design, carry out, and circulate the results’ (Davis and Craven, 2020, p. 288). While conducting my ethnographic research, I negotiated with Iraqi, Kuwaiti and Yemeni women activists I interviewed to discuss whether they preferred their identities to be revealed or protected in my research findings. Together, we agreed that the use of pseudonyms would safeguard everyone involved.

Reciprocity demands that ‘we listen, do not speak for the other, and become aware of cultural differences through identity, privileges, and oppressions’ (Ghabra, 2015, p. 8). Speaking in Twitter Spaces from a diasporic position is a privilege that must be recognised and acknowledged. Therefore, I tailored my approach with consideration of this privilege from the beginning. In each instance, I introduced myself to the space’s (co-)hosts and audience, briefly summarised the purpose of my research and then asked the space’s (co-)hosts for permission to participate and speak. Asking for permission to speak from women who live in authoritarian contexts concurrently blurs the boundaries between the ‘privileged’ and the ‘vulnerable’ and highlights the continuous shifting positionalities in this context.

The distinction is further blurred when addressing and interacting with multiple audiences. Activists and scholars in diasporic locations find themselves amidst a tornado of contested discourses in Western locations and their home countries, which they must challenge and deconstruct without prioritising certain discourses over others. As Al-Ali (2019, p. 24) explains, ‘a diasporic positionality is highly complex and challenging in the current climate of heightened Islamophobia, racism, anti-refugee and anti-immigration sentiments and the rise of right-wing movements and constituencies in Europe and North America’. Therefore, talking about sensitive issues in the Middle East, such as GBV, may require scholar-activists in the diaspora to constantly draw parallels between Western and non-Western contexts to illustrate that GBV, for instance, is inherent in different societies and cultures. Nonetheless, for activists inside these countries, the local dynamics and actors may be far more critical than the global ones.

Scholar-activists must recognise participants’ diverse positionalities and viewpoints towards these issues, and work with them to negotiate the possibility of a more nuanced and critical approach. In my interviews, as well as in Twitter Spaces I have attended, I deliberate these dilemmas with other feminists, empathising with them and their views while simultaneously drawing their attention to the issue of positionality and the target audience, explaining that global structures converge with local ones to enhance women’s oppression. In such encounters, my aim as a researcher and activist is to ‘speak with’ rather than ‘speak for’ fellow activists (see Alcoff, 1991), negotiating our different positions from an ethic of fellowship through which we validate and legitimise our heterogenous experiences and viewpoints without being excluded from the narrative.

As the following section demonstrates, speaking with fellow activists can open up opportunities for forms of critical allyship with a morally critical stance, and also foster collaboration and solidarity.

Critical allyship

Critical allyship is understood in this article as an ongoing process of acting by working with others. It is, therefore, a practice, not an identity (Gates, Bennett and Baines, 2021). Critical allyship is a crucial dimension of building fellowships grounded in honesty, responsibility, care and accountability (Indigenous Action, 2014, cited in Gates, Bennett and Baines, 2021, p. 378). When anti-street harassment mobilisation took place in Iraq through witnessing and documenting such actions via mobile phones and then sharing the footage on social media, I spoke with other Iraqi feminists on Twitter. Although we collectively supported women who filmed the harasser in our tweets and posts, some of us were mindful of the potential consequences that could arise as a result. I found that merely commending their bravery was not enough as it fell short of considering women’s safety, a position some fellow activists agreed with. In an environment dominated by tribes, armed factions and religious clerics at the expense of strong institutions and laws, questions remain about the safety of women who decide to take this step and the consequences they may face should their identities be revealed. In tweets and a Twitter Space, we shared tips and strategies for protection in the street, reminding girls to weigh the risks and potentials of filming the harasser. For example, if they are not surrounded by people it may be risky to challenge the harasser with a phone, as we cannot predict the reaction. Their safety in this and all scenarios should be prioritised.

Such mobilisation marked an instance of critical allyship as rafyqāt, resisting together from our diverse positionalities to act with responsibility and care about others (Ghabra, 2015). To expand and elaborate on the aforementioned concerns, I wanted to write a non-academic in-depth piece about harassment in Arabic. From a decolonial and transnational perspective, writing in Arabic challenges the dominance and entitlement of the English language ‘as the main linguistic lens to shape our intellectual thoughts’ (Falcón, 2016, p. 189). However, I wanted it to be a co-authored piece with an activist living in Iraq. I initially discussed the idea with a fellow activist who took part in my study. Given that choosing the right platform to support non-academic means of knowledge production is as important as the act of writing and publication, we chose Jummar Media, a non-partisan Iraqi platform launched in early October 2022. The platform is committed to the ethics of journalism produced ‘for and from the community, dealing with the issues of its marginalised groups and highlighting their stories’. ¹³ These values are compatible with critical feminist principles and the ethics of the activist fellowship method. Moreover, I knew the managing editor from an earlier collaboration on the Tishreen Revolution, so I trusted this platform would be the right place for the article. Coincidently, the editor approached me, proposing that I write something about the visual documentation of street harassment. When I asked the editor if they were interested in publishing a co-authored article, the response was positive. I have since co-authored another Arabic piece with the same activist and continue to collaborate with other Iraqi feminists through various means, including offering to both read their written work and provide feedback for development.

Although writing in Arabic is crucial for communicating my research to local communities, writing and circulating it in English is equally important to reach a broader academic and non-academic community in the West. Thus, translation becomes a necessary, yet challenging, tool to use in our research practices so that ‘feminist thoughts that are developed in non-English-speaking Global South countries … [reach] feminists in the Global North’ (Bose, 2011, p. 748). It is a strategy for engaging in bilingual communication, moving away from monolingualism and overcoming language barriers (Falcón, 2016, also see Marcus, 1995). For these reasons, I consciously translated the co-authored piece into English and published it on the same Iraqi platform after negotiating the point with the founders and editors. My major in Translation Studies facilitated this task for me, and I endeavour to continue translating my work in both directions whenever possible.

Critical allyship is a committed practice of demonstrating solidarity with other fellow activists, irrespective of our differences and disagreements. For example, one famous Iraqi female activist was shamed online, following her involvement in an online outcry against Article 398 of the Iraqi Penal Code, which stipulates that the penalty of the rapist can be annulled should they marry their victims. Her Twitter account was suspended due to reports, but many other activists who do not share the same vision supported her nonetheless. ¹⁴ As bell hooks (1984, p. 67) reminds us, ‘Women do not need to eradicate difference to feel solidarity … [they need] ongoing commitment’. However, one must ask, is it always possible to express solidarity and to ally with all fellow activists, regardless of all dimensions of differences, including political or sexual orientation? In the penultimate section, I discuss the limitations of the fellowship-based method, with a focus on moments of inevitable silence I have confronted in my research and activism.

Activist silences

The dimensions and examples I have shared thus far reflect the strengths of a fellowship method and its potential to navigate relationships between the researcher and their informants, as well as the broader community online. Ethically adhering to activist transparency and critical allyship can foster collaboration and solidarity around shared struggle. This could not have been possible without speaking up and courageously breaking the silence around sensitive topics: actions that lie at the heart of feminist activism and research. However, there are times when speaking up becomes not only challenging but also potentially dangerous, leading to unintended consequences that endanger the lives of others. In such cases, silence may become a necessary choice.

Silence may sound counterintuitive to feminist epistemology, research and ethics, but as Róisín Ryan-Flood and Rosalind Gill (2010) remind us, it does matter. The meanings and effects of silence vary according to our geographical location, positionality, relationships with other participants and the broader context we are involved in as researchers. There are various ways in which ‘one may silence or be silenced, keep silent out of respect, rage, fear or shame, or even as a mode of resistance’ (ibid., p. 1). Silence can be a responsible choice arising from legitimate care for the safety and security of those living in authoritarian contexts. In the Saudi case, expressing a political view critical of Mohammed Bin Salman’s rule in a space opened by women inside the kingdom may be life-threatening. I have chosen to remain silent in such spaces even though I fully recognise that I will, in all likelihood, be muted should I dare share unwelcome political views. Herein lies the limitations of the fellowship method.

Further, in my activism and ethnography, I could not engage with women who are not within the domain of heteronormativity. On Twitter, I follow those who dare to reveal their sexualities, most of whom live outside the four countries in question. Moreover, I do intervene to challenge homophobic discourses. Nevertheless, I cannot do more within these parameters. A strong stigma already exists around feminism in the context of the four case studies, where feminism is equated to lesbianism in a demeaning, dehumanising and demonising way. Speaking up about marginalised sexualities would affirm the latter narrative, running the risk of tarnishing all other women, endangering them and jeopardising their safety. Unlike the vulnerable position of my participants and other fellow activists, I enjoy a relatively safer position in speaking, researching and writing from the UK. I would not be affected by the same consequences that the women in these regions may be subjected to. Meanwhile, openly speaking up about such taboos can harshly backfire on these marginalised groups, further generating intense feelings of hatred and incitement.

In December 2022, a founding member of the Basra Feminist Team, a voluntary group of young feminists from the southern Iraqi province of Basra, reached out to me, expressing her fears after a newly launched Iraqi media platform posted an anti-feminism video on YouTube. In this video, and another one released shortly afterwards, the platform used content from the Basra Feminist Team to create their anti-feminist narrative. An online session was organised by the Basra Feminist Team and published on their YouTube channel, in which a Team member and co-founder responded to a question about homosexuality. This was taken out of context and reframed by the Iraqi media platform to demonise the team as promoters of homosexuality and atheism. The member in question asked me not to share the videos on my Twitter account or to talk about them publicly, lest it draw more attention and increase their visibility. She told me that if the video reached the families of her fellow members, it would be ‘catastrophic’. She needed only support and empathy rather than public activism. I respected her request and never commented about the two videos on my Twitter account. Further, I can only write about this situation now after negotiating the matter with the activist in question. It is important to the Basra Feminist Team that the world knows the challenges they face and how such adversity can cripple their activism. Indeed, the Team published a statement on their Twitter and Instagram accounts denying the accusations without re-posting the videos or revealing the name of the agency in question and, moreover, without subscribing to homophobic tropes. ¹⁵ However, their activism has been significantly impacted and undermined ever since.

Conclusions: the way forward

Feminist activist ethnographic research exclusively conducted online is challenging. First and foremost, it requires long-term immersion in social media as an activist with a prominent and active presence. Such immersion is vital to gaining access to dynamic and ever-evolving fieldwork with no clear boundaries, building rapport with other feminists and establishing ties with many of them. In my personal experience as an activist in social media spaces, I found it hard to develop friendship relationships with other women activists in the traditional sense of the word and through the lens of my cultural background, lacking the in-person encounter. I have illustrated in this article how this difficulty was fruitful in paving the way for adopting a method based on a fellowship affiliation in the two senses of peer- and comrade-driven relationships. Drawing on Söderström, Åkebo and Jarstad (2021), I contend that this method enables the researcher and her participants to work together from a stance of critique, respect and responsibility, without feeling the heavy burden that may come with a friendship relationship.

It is almost impossible for activists from diverse backgrounds to agree on everything. Conformity may become counterintuitive and unproductive in the long term. In practice, researchers need to be committed to a continuous process of activist transparency and critical allyship beyond the mere disclosure of one’s identity and research, and more towards action. I have presented concrete examples from my work to demonstrate the potential of honest, respectful and compassionate interaction with others in creating an environment where collaboration, reciprocity and solidarity can be achieved. Nevertheless, the potential of allyship can be challenged and undermined when we find ourselves caught between a rock and a hard place. Silence can become a very hard, yet less risky, alternative.

Additionally, in a rapidly changing internet-mediated medium, questions remain about our ability to connect with other feminists and women activists across borders through Twitter. At the time of writing in May 2023, Elon Musk, Twitter’s new owner, announced significant changes to the platform, including fees to obtain the ‘blue tick’ verification mark (Conger, 2023). My initial observations of the changes that have so far occurred indicate that the feminist territories that I have discussed earlier in the article are increasingly becoming interrupted. In other words, visibility and connectivity with other feminists who do not subscribe to the verification tag are impacted, an issue that requires our attention in future studies. In January 2023, I decided to utilise Instagram to communicate with other feminists in addition to Twitter. Would Instagram provide a better alternative to resisting the changes brought to Twitter (X)? Would its visual affordances create new opportunities for feminist connectivity and consciousness-raising? While it is too early to answer such questions, moving to a different platform highlights the dynamicity of online spaces and digital ethnographies and the constant need to experiment and negotiate with new tools and platforms.

Notwithstanding the significant challenges associated with non-academic activist work, particularly the exhausting, demanding and time-consuming nature it involves, and the continuous pressure on researchers to satisfy institutional and epistemological requirements (Flood, Martin and Dreher, 2013), a fellowship-based method instils a lifelong commitment to others, whether participants or communities. Responsibility and commitment make our academic work meaningful, valuable and rewarding. When the cause is the field, there is no departure.