The Arab Families Working Group ARCHIVAL PROJECT engages in two forms of analysis:
1.) Analysis of the historical context in the Arab Region during the first two decades of the 21st century as AFWG was launching its work.
2.) Analysis of the minutes of the AFWG to develop an institutional analysis that documents the transformation of AFW over this same period of time from 2001 to 2020. The goal is to situate AFWG’s specific theoretical and empirical research at the time.
The category of youth, for instance, in the early 2000s, was very significant. With the Arab world experiencing a demographic phenomenon that was called “the youth bulge,” the events of 9/11, the US invasion of Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003) under the banner of the war on terror, the Arab youth had come to be seen in a number of Western and regional capitals, as representing the figure of the violent terrorist Muslim. Education had ceased to have a tangible relevance to the job market while anxiety and the loss of hope became synonymous with living in the Arab region. Consequently, the AFWG members immersed their research in concepts of migration, displacement, desire, representation of youth in media, law, and education, and marriage.
The main concern of the institutional analysis of the AFWG is to understand its work as an organization that aimed to produce and disseminate knowledge about Arab families and youth. The AFWG Archival Project aims to answer the following questions: What were the conditions that aided or hampered the production of knowledge in the AFWG? How did AFWG change over the years starting in 2001. How did evolve from its original premise of collaborative, comparative, interdisciplinary research to become a project focusing on training early career scholars in the Arab Region.
The AFWG archives are housed at the American University in Cairo Library. Among the research assistants working with AFWG Founder and Director on the AFWG Archival project are: Mayar Ibrahim, Soha Mohsen, Amira Othman, and Marwa Sabah.