Lecture with subject "Accessing memory: Negotiating challenges and possibilities of oral history in understanding post WWII apartment housing in the Eastern Mediterranean"
19:30-19:40 Introduction by Konstantina Kalfa:
Crafting bottom-up approaches to explore bottom-up phenomena: The case of Athens
19:40-20:20 Lecture by Rowan Ashraf Aly:
Accessing memory: Negotiating challenges and possibilities of oral history in understanding post WWII apartment housing in the Eastern Mediterranean
This lecture presents ongoing fieldwork in Cairo that employs oral history as a method for understanding the city’s post-WWII built environment, with a particular focus on middle-class housing. It reflects on the methodological challenges encountered in accessing knowledge in Cairo, where formal research channels, such as government offices and official archives, often prove limited, inaccessible, or unproductive. In response, the research process required a continuous negotiation of access: identifying who holds relevant knowledge, determining how and when to approach them, and adapting questions and strategies in the field. These challenges reveal that urban knowledge in Cairo is not readily available through institutional frameworks, but is instead dispersed, informal, and embedded in everyday social relations. At the same time, these constraints opened up new possibilities for oral history as a method. Engaging directly with residents’ narratives allowed for the exploration of lived experiences, memory, and everyday practices that remain absent from formal accounts. The presentation argues that the very difficulties of conducting oral history in Cairo, such as limited access, hesitation, and selective memory, are not simply obstacles, but productive conditions that reshape how the built environment can be understood.By foregrounding both the challenges and the opportunities of fieldwork, the lecture positions oral history as a critical and adaptive method for uncovering the social, spatial, and experiential dimensions of Cairo’s urban history.
Bio:
Rowan Ashraf Aly holds a Master of Science in Architectural History, Theory, and Society from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Bachelor of Science in Architectural Engineering from the American University in Cairo. Throughout her academic journey, she has been awarded several prestigious fellowships and grants, including the El-Ghurair Foundation Scholarship, the USAID STEM High School Fellowship, the GSI Fellowship, and a departmental grant supporting her teaching and research at UC Berkeley.