At the “Ethnographic Experiments From and With the Arab World” conference, ULB PhD candidate Orouba Othman presented her paper on “sensory genocide” in Gaza, exploring how violence restructures collective sensory life. The event brought together scholars from Arab and international universities to challenge dominant epistemologies in ethnography.

Orouba Othman, PhD candidate in the Social and Political Sciences program at ULB, participated in the conference and workshop “Ethnographic Experiments From and With the Arab World,” organized by the Sociology and Anthropology Program at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies. The event took place on 15–16 December 2025 and brought together eight researchers and academics from Arab and international universities.

The conference and workshop aimed to critically engage with dominant conceptual frameworks and epistemological debates within Arab knowledge production, advocating for ethnographic research grounded in lived everyday conditions. The initiative sought to contribute to the localization of anthropological knowledge and to question its historical entanglement with imperial epistemologies.

Othman presented a paper entitled “Rubble That Swallows the Senses: An Ethnography of Sensory Genocide in Gaza.” The paper introduces the concept of “sensory genocide” to examine how genocidal violence restructures and reprograms the collective sensory world of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. It argues that violence operates not only through the destruction of bodies and space, but also through the transformation of the senses into forced instruments of continuous pain, trauma, and hyper-vigilance.

Drawing on digital sensory ethnography, including visual materials, daily narratives from the researcher’s family in Gaza, and semi-structured interviews, the study explores how war produces a lasting sensory environment that continues to shape perception, memory, and meaning beyond moments of direct violence. The paper further reflects on the sensory formation of children who have never experienced a world outside the temporality of genocide, raising questions about how fear, scarcity, and exposure become foundational to their ways of sensing and inhabiting the world. Beyond dominant representations of violence, the research foregrounds everyday sensory practices as embodied forms of both pain and resistance. Particular attention is given to the experiences of families searching for loved ones under the rubble, where intense sensory engagement—listening for breath, encountering bodily remains—becomes central to mourning, recognition, and the negotiation of life and death.

The conference sessions addressed ethnographic intersections, methodological challenges, and the role of the Gulf in and through ethnography. The event concluded with a closed workshop dedicated to advanced ethnographic themes, including anthropological hospitality, migrant masculinities, psychological violence, and power relations in contexts of exile and displacement. Selected papers from the conference are expected to be published in a special issue of a leading international anthropology journal.

https://www.dohainstitute.edu.qa/admin/Documents/Ethnographic%20Booklet_%20Ethnograhic%20Experiments.pdf