Acciones para generar las explicaciones

We are all influenced by our own worldview and upbringing that filter the data we collect and analysis we come up with. My research approach fits into a feminist interpretive social science paradigm. An interpretive social scientist attempts to thoroughly understand the everyday lived experiences of people by a focus on direct contact in natural settings (Neuman 2000: 70-71). My primary methods pivot on participant observation, interviews, focus groups, and farm visits. Because of my prior training in Agriculture and Natural Resource Management, I was able to converse with local farmers and officials on their own terms, developing strong research relations on the basis of shared expertise.

The interpretive approach considers that action and reality have no inherent meaning on their own, but that meaning is held in subjective ways by various social actors (Neuman

2000: 71-72). I identified the social actors with regards to women's experiences with land access through the MRS as the women landholders, government and development agencies’ officials, family members, and other local men and women. I use systemic logic by observing patterns in data based on ethnographic material (Bernard 2006), such as stories, rumours, behaviors, and opinions, particularly those that pertain to the relationships between the settlers and Egyptian government, to understand narratives—here viewed as automatic thoughts and behaviours for understanding the world (Roe 1994)—around women and their experiences with land access.

I also integrate a feminist approach, whereby I pay attention to gender and other social inequalities and make inequality (and injustice) an explicit focus of this research with an awareness that the experiences of women differ from those of men and are also different from one woman to the next (Neuman 2000: 82; Goebel 2010). In the field, I refused to be treated differently from the women settlers. I rode in the back of cars with women when I was asked, as a guest, to sit in the front. I participated in labour and rode on donkeys with women. I often stressed that the women landholders were my teachers and professors, as sometimes many women in the beginning believed me to be knowledgeable about many aspects of their communities. I also often told women landholders whom I interacted with that, although I constantly interact with the government, development agencies and NGO officials, if I was to take a side, it would be theirs. All this being said, I do acknowledge that a power difference was inherent in my relationships with these women.

By collecting detailed life histories, I was able to assess the differences between the experiences of selected women landholders (Geiger 1986; Peacock and Holland 1993). Abu Lughod (1991: 149-157) employs the notion of the ethnography of the particular, whereby ethnographers focus on the particulars of an individual’s life that often manifests the impacts of extra-local and long-term processes. Along the same lines, Goebel (2010: 71) explains how scholars concerned with land rights for women evaluate the impact of globalization and capitalism on the local land tenure and gender relations through a sustained focus on

extensive empirical work. I use life histories to understand how individual women’s lives have changed with their access to land, these women’s feelings and aspirations, and the factors (local and external) that impede or enable women to benefit from the land (socially and/or economically). I also differentiate between the particularities of Upper and Lower

Egypt. I look at whether and how the two sites differ or overlap in the gendered roles and relations, government and development agencies policies, socio-economic factors, and biophysical characteristics.

Feminist researchers, in addition to believing that gender has a fundamental role in shaping culture and society, also believe that gender has a role in the researchers’ findings (Neuman 2000: 83; Sprague 2005: 3). I employ reflexivity, particularly awareness that my gender and researcher status mediates the informants that I am able to interact with and topics that can be discussed (Altorki and El-Solh 1988; Wright 2006). I was able, for the most part, to build friendships with women, and not men, as it is culturally inappropriate to build friendships with men, especially in Upper Egypt. In fact, most of the male informants often proposed to me as I interacted with them on a regular basis. This constant interest in me as a bride and a culturally inappropriate behavior of befriending non-related men led to my reluctance to interact with men (single or married) on other than professional grounds. I limited my interaction to those men, for the most part, who are government employees in the Local Development Units (LDU), such as the drivers and Village Engineers. Nonetheless, I became friends with younger men, who are the sons of women landholders, and a few were also my research assistants. On a few occasions, I spoke with men when accompanied by women landholders. Also, I was not able to enter into male-specific worlds such as the mosques and the local coffee shops. In addition to my gender, the government mediated my interactions with informants.

The LRS of the MALR facilitated my research in generous ways but also restricted the people and places that I could visit. I, first, visited the Head of the LRS, akin to the Minister of Agriculture in the New Lands, and told him that I want to describe the status of women as landholders in the MRS, a pioneering experience in the Arab world for other parts of the world to learn about it and for providing recommendations to the ongoing reclamation efforts. Both the former and current Heads of the LRS welcomed my research topic and are interested in my findings. Being PhD-holders themselves, they understood the value of research.

Both the interpretive and feminist approaches develop personal relationships with the informants, but the feminist approach also considers action towards social change and gender

equality (Neuman 2000: 83; Sprague 2005: 3). I explicitly mentioned in my research

objectives a focus on providing recommendations for a better inclusion of women in the LRS and won two major research grants, a Middle East Research Competition from the Ford Foundation and an International Doctoral Research Award from the International Development Research Center (IDRC), which condition a public policy implications

component in the research and plans for dissemination. My own upbringing shapes this focus on land rights for women. As an Arab who grew up in Lebanon and Saudi Arabia, I have witnessed first-hand gender inequalities related to women’s lives in the Middle East. Now as a scholar with field experience in Agriculture and Natural Resource Management, and with training in Socio-cultural Anthropology, I am motivated to contribute to the elimination of injustices for women in the Middle East, specifically through a focus on Egypt’s New Lands.

Even in the field, I aimed for change. I facilitated one workshop in Upper Egypt and also held individual discussions with various women landholders regarding their roles as members in the local agricultural cooperatives for these women’s improved involvement in public life. I held the one workshop in the LAC of the ‘Widow Village’ (Samaha) in the presence of the Village Engineer, sons, and other men in the community who resisted the involvement of women landholders, including the board members, in the local village cooperative. Finally, I convinced the Head of the Say’da settlement to provide a dozen women landholders with micro-credit, previously thought unworthy of micro-credit due to a misconception that states that women landholders inadequately farm their lands. Nonetheless, many of the recommendations stemming from the current research (refer to Appendix C) also involve male settlers.