The Center for Contemporary Arab Studies (CCAS) is the first and oldest academic center in the United States focusing exclusively on the Arab world. Since its founding in 1975, CCAS has prepared new generations of diplomats, scholars, teachers, policymakers and leaders in the business and nonprofit sectors capable of critical thought, constructive dialogue and creative engagement with the Arab world.
SFS Professor Fida Adely, CCAS director and Clovis and Hala Salaam Maksoud Chair in Arab Studies, brings a human development lens to her scholarship. Adely’s 2024 book, Working Women in Jordan, is a prime example of this work, offering a look at the social changes in Jordan as lived and navigated by educated women. Adely recently answered some questions about the book’s scope, its ethnographic insights and how it fits into CCAS’ 50-year legacy.
Q. What drew you to this subject? What central questions guided your research?
I have to start by talking about my first book about girls’ secondary education in Jordan. One of the things that drew me to working on secondary education was that girls were graduating from high school at higher rates than boys in several countries in the region, and specifically in Jordan. Development organizations like the World Bank framed high rates of education for women in Jordan and in the Arab world as “paradoxical” because they had relatively low rates of labor force participation. In this earlier work, I made the argument that education was not just about work. People pursue education for many other reasons and states and societies have multiple goals in wanting to educate their population.
But then, as I was conducting some research in 2011, I started meeting more women in the capital city of Amman who had migrated internally to the capital for work. And many of those women were framing this migration as about their education. They had a university education and had to come to Amman because the kinds of opportunities they aspired to as educated women weren’t available in the provinces. So it was really a flip on my initial project, in which I argued education is not just about labor. On the second project, women were saying to me that education was a key rationale for their migration.
It also was a bit surprising to meet so many women from rural areas or provincial areas who were living independently in Amman because the norm for adult children, male or female, really is to live with their families until they marry—unless they migrate. I was really interested in their own narratives about why this was happening, how they convinced their families that this was the right move and what this said or didn’t say about change in Jordanian society, particularly change around gender roles and norms.
Q. One compelling thread in the book is how young women’s personal ambitions are shaped by national development narratives and labor market policies. Can you share an example that illustrates these impacts? What does it tell us about the relationship between individual agency and structural change?
Structurally, I think there were a few key factors. One is neoliberal economic policies that have reshaped Jordan’s economy since the early ’90s. It has changed the role of the public sector in Jordan, but it has also contributed to a discourse around efficiency and productivity and ideas about what successful work looks like. In that sense, many of the women talked about the fact that there were no labor opportunities in their provinces or that they didn’t want to work in the public sector. They had this aspiration tied to the “promise of better jobs in the private sector”, although if you look at the labor market data for Jordan, over time, the private sector has been slow to create the kind of jobs that people expected these policies would generate for a lot of different reasons. Even so, the ideas of young educated people about what desirable work is have shifted pretty significantly.
The spread of education and the high rates of women completing secondary education and post-secondary education, relative to males, are also an important part of the structural contexts, as well as high rates of enrollment in STEM fields for women.
While structural factors are a key part of understanding this internal migration, these women were pretty remarkable in their own right. In the book, I map the ways in which their education, their own aspirations in the context of these structures that they have to navigate and work with, and their own drive are all part of the story.
As a scholar, I really grappled with their own individual agency given structural constraints. I ended up using a term, “creative agency”, coined by another scholar, Lois McNay, to think about the ways in which we’re all constrained by structural factors in our lives and by the history we inherit, but this is also the material we work with to create our lives. The women I spoke with were powerful actors in this context and they paved a way that many women of their own generation, with very similar backgrounds, didn’t necessarily aspire to or want or feel like was worth the battle.
Q. Your book is grounded in rich ethnographic research and the lived experiences of the women you interviewed. What were some of the challenges or opportunities you encountered while doing fieldwork in this context?
Once you become a full-time professor, you have less time to go out in the field. You can’t immerse yourself in the ways I did with my first project in the sense of spending a couple of years in one community or one space and really explore these issues more deeply. At the same time, anthropology has really moved away from site-specific research, and multi-sited historical work that enriches the ethnographic research has become more the norm. One aspect I wish I had more time for was meeting with the families of these women, talking to their parents. I spoke to the young women a lot about their families, but I would have loved to go to their home communities and meet with more of the families and get to know them, and I only did that very sparingly.
For the book, I chose to focus on this group of professional women and their experiences and to follow them over time to understand the ups and downs of their experiences, how their own aspirations and expectations shift over time. This is something I think that’s challenging for ethnographers overall. Time is a really important factor, and traditionally the weakness of ethnography was that it was a snapshot in time.
Q. This book comes at a significant moment, as the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies (CCAS) prepares to mark its fiftieth anniversary. How does Working Women in Jordan reflect or contribute to the Center’s broader mission and legacy?
The vision for this position I hold, the Clovis and Hala Salaam Maksoud Chair in Arab Studies, was to bring someone into CCAS who really focused on human development issues. The UNDP [United Nations Development Programme] in 1990 developed the human development index to move from thinking about development purely in terms of economic outcomes and led to an emphasis on variables such as literacy and health outcomes. At CCAS, we always had scholars working on politics and political economy and economics. And then we had folks working on Islam and art and culture. Our founders endowed different chairs to focus on these areas, so my position was kind of rounding this out and thinking about research on and teaching about development from a more of a ground-up perspective and a human impact perspective. In that sense, the chair I hold, which brought me to Georgetown, was a core part of expanding and diversifying the work of the center.
Another way in which this book is connected to the center is how it is connected to some of our students. We get so many remarkable young women from the region to come study in our master’s program. I’ve taught many young university students or graduate students from the region who’ve read my work and have very kindly and thoughtfully shared that it resonated a lot with their own experiences. It was very valuable for me to hear that as a scholar. In a lot of ways at CCAS, what we research and teach about is directly connected to members of our community. CCAS has always been about this—centering the diverse experiences, perspectives and knowledge of people in the region and developing linguistic skills and interdisciplinary knowledge for ethical engagements with and in the region.
Q. What do you see as the next critical questions or directions for research on gender, work and mobility in the Middle East? Where do we go from here?
As a scholar of Jordan, what is increasingly clear to me is we can’t talk about gender and labor without talking about broader economic challenges. If I’m going to continue this line of research, I really want to do a study that incorporates both men and women and thinks about how families are negotiating the economic challenges they face. I think we need more scholarship that either focuses on men or focuses on both men and women when thinking about gender. Most gender scholarship focuses on women, but doesn’t really pay enough attention to gender as a dynamic that is not just about women. An article I published with three SFS undergraduates in the International Journal of Educational Development is an example of this approach.