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Knowledge Produced but Not Used: Predicaments of Social Research in the Arab World

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Universities in Arab Countries: An Urgent Need for Change

Abstract

The Arab world has more problems in knowledge use than in knowledge production. Without translating academic research into policy and public awareness, research will be read by few people who constitute an elite that is disconnected from their society and thus the research will not impact on it. It is rare to hear professional social researchers speak in the public sphere. This is due not only to the absence of their products in the mass media or newspapers but also to the difficulty of conversing with the policy makers.

This chapter is the outcome of a long reflection on the status of knowledge production in the Arab world by the use of not only empirical observations but also historical-structural analyses. Some of these results were co-published with Rigas Arvanitis. In addition, I conducted empirical and desk research. As I have longstanding experience in this field as a researcher and professor and participant observer, I will deliver some personal thoughts about the connection between social science with policy making and with public debate.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This method was developed by Alain Touraine (1981)

  2. 2.

    Findings showed that only 16 percent of the participants interacted with policy-makers and stakeholders in priority settings, and 19.8 percent involved policy-makers in the process of developing their research . As for research dissemination, it was found that researchers are more likely to transfer their research findings to other researchers (67.2 percent) rather than to policy-makers (40.5 percent)

  3. 3.

    Based on EHESS (School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences)- Paris.

  4. 4.

    Credit here to Nadim Shahadeh who labeled LPDC as such.

  5. 5.

    Some of these requests for study pose a moral dilemma for me. For instance, while I accepted to conduct research on the situation of the Palestinian professionals in Lebanon , I refused to do a study that aimed to show that the right of the Palestinian refugees to work would have little affect the labor market. For me, whether this would affect it or not, this is simply a right and ethics of care for a population who live in the country for more than four generations.

  6. 6.

    See criticism of the Burawoy public sociology from this point of view in Horák 2017

  7. 7.

    Informal conversation with him, 14 Sept. 2017

  8. 8.

    Bahrain and the UAE announced in June 2017 that expressing sympathy for Qatar is an offence punishable by a lengthy jail term. In Bahrain, “Any expression of sympathy with the government of Qatar or opposition to the measures taken by the government of Bahrain, whether through social media, Twitter or any other form of communication, is a criminal offence punishable by up to five years in prison and a fine”, while in the UAE announced a similar decision, warning that offenders could face between three and 15 years in prison and a Dh500,000 fine. See https://www.thenational.ae/world/uae-and-saudi-arabia-cut-ties-with-qatar-live-updates-1.24574

  9. 9.

    For more details about the violation of academic freedom in the Arab world see Hanafi 2015.

  10. 10.

    Aggregative democrats consider democracy as a way of aggregating individual preferences to collective choices. (Christensen and Holst 2017)

  11. 11.

    This portal is collecting research projects on the Arab World through a three-language interface (Arabic, English, and French) and is supported by a powerful data search engine (supporting the use of research field(s), keywords, researcher, beneficiary’s institution, beneficiary’s target group, etc.). See http://www.psisr.net.

  12. 12.

    In addition of this database there is another one (but not open access) created by ProQuest: The Latin America & Iberia Database includes ongoing full-text academic journals that are locally published in a number of Latin American countries, Spain, and Portugal.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, Anthropology & Media Studies, American University of Beirut, Beirut, Lebanon

    Sari Hanafi

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  1. Sari Hanafi
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Correspondence to Sari Hanafi .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biology, American University of Beirut, Beirut, Lebanon

    Elias Baydoun

  2. James Hutton Institute, Invergowrie, Dundee, United Kingdom

    John R. Hillman

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Hanafi, S. (2018). Knowledge Produced but Not Used: Predicaments of Social Research in the Arab World. In: Baydoun, E., Hillman, J. (eds) Universities in Arab Countries: An Urgent Need for Change. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73111-7_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73111-7_7

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