This presentation will be on the process of gaining access to religious women spaces and how the camera played an important role in the whole process.
Paper long abstract
Before going to fieldwork, I always found it useful to read other researchers' accounts on how they gained access and what type of negotiations they had to do. A researcher cannot always anticipate what type of challenges can happen especially if their fieldwork topic changes while still in the process of conducting the research.
In this presentation, I will share my experience of doing fieldwork with a camera among pious Shia women artists in Kuwait. Gaining access to religious spaces may not be necessarily difficult but when a camera is introduced, it can change so many factors. I will be presenting some of the challenges that I faced and how I dealt with them. I will also tackle the question of what type of knowledge the camera is capable of producing in an environment where filming is not allowed?