Aya's Margins

This blog started in January 2016, and no it wasn’t a new year’s resolution.

Just before starting my fieldwork, my supervisors suggested I keep a blog. Since the idea of putting myself out there in the world is, well, not a favorite, I didn’t feel like blogging is my thing. After all there are great blogs about Cairo (in the blogs I follow section) and better ones on PhDing, research, cities and urbanism, the Middle East and so on.

Yet here I am.

I took me a month to realize that field notes cannot accommodate all the constellation of happenings that emerge out of being here as a researcher and not only a city-zen.  More recently, the blog has generously accommodated my own renditions on being a phd student, the inevitable sentimentalism that accompanies any project of making meaning of the world- academic or otherwise. The blog is not about my PhD, but about it’s margins.

I left this blog dormant from 2018 till 2021. As I try to rekindle it again I worry that it might take a more coherent guise than what was intended initially. I now teach and research geography, try to think more about teaching and I am not in Cairo as much as I would like to be.