El-Kouny, Nada <br/><br/>
Navigating fieldwork in Egypt’s Nile Delta 

 -  2023.<br/>							 
<br/><br/> 35 
<br/><br/> This essay describes my experience conducting ethnographic and archival research in Egypt from 2014 to 2018 for my doctoral dissertation. It begins by recounting my initial visit to a village in the Daqahliya governorate of Egypt in 2012, where I was working as a journalist during a time of political overture in 2012. I describe my first-hand encounters and experiences in this village. However, due to security threats directed at both my research participants and myself in 2016, I was forced to leave the research site and relocate my work to a different village, in the Nile Delta governorate of Beheira. This relocation meant that my research examined my family’s ancestral village, where many of my family members still live. This transition from a village that I was exploring for the first time to the one that my own family comes from was accompanied by a change in the way I related to interviewees. Moreover, the change brought with it various forms of surveillance that impacted my research, ranging from security surveillance to familial control. This article therefore looks at the challenges of conducting fieldwork in an Egyptian context marked by political repression and the targeting of researchers. It also looks at ways of navigating these challenges when conducting ethnographic and archival research, in light of these constraints.