Workshop
Research Methodologies
This workshop focuses on developing critical research questions and selecting effective research methods to explore them. Participants will learn to assess the strengths and limitations of various research tools and identify gaps in existing approaches. Emphasis is placed on critical reflection and the creative design of new or adapted methods better suited to complex, interdisciplinary inquiries.
This workshop opens with the question “Where are you?”—not to locate the self, but to unsettle it. It approaches research as a practice of dwelling within uncertainty, where questions are not merely tools, but thresholds. Participants are invited to craft critical inquiries that move across disciplines, and to engage methodologies not as fixed frameworks, but as shifting grounds. Through encounters with religious, academic, and literary texts, alongside artistic and cultural works, the workshop traces how place is not only inhabited, but imagined, narrated, and contested—always in relation to power, memory, and the fragile work of meaning-making.
Interrogating methodological assumptions and dominant epistemological frameworks, particularly those with colonial roots.
Encouraging the development of alternative methodological approaches rooted in the participants' own experiences and specific contexts.
Rethinking the relationship between the self, the other, and space within critical research frameworks.
Exploring community archiving as a sustainable and participatory methodology.
Developing the ability to formulate research questions that transcend the obvious and familiar within the context of urban research.
Instructor
Mina IbrahimMina Ibrahim is an anthropologist and archivist whose work focuses on the intersections of archives, memory, migration, and justice across the Middle East and Europe. He is the founding director of Sard for History and Social Research (Shubra’s Archive), Egypt’s first community archive, and a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Conflict Studies at the University of Marburg in Germany. He received his PhD in Cultural Studies from the University of Giessen in Germany in 2022, and he also held a visiting professorship at Ghent University in Belgium in 2025.
For over a decade, his work has spanned academic research and public engagement in Egypt, Lebanon, and Europe, focusing on how migrants, displaced people, and survivors of war and violence narrate their histories, own their memories, and build their archives. Relatedly, has previously taught at the universities of Marburg and Giessen, University of Saint Joseph in Beirut, and the University of Kent in the United Kingdom.