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Abstract

Women-centered qualitative research in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) requires methodological approaches attentive to the places and practices through which Emirati women produce, share, and interpret knowledge. While feminist, decolonial, and participatory methodologies have challenged research approaches centered around men that are adapted for use in the UAE, comparatively little attention has been paid to grounding research in the everyday epistemic practices and social worlds of Emirati women. In this article, we develop a majlis-based relational methodology as a women-centered qualitative approach in the UAE. Our approach is centered on the women’s majlis—an Arabic term meaning a communal gathering place or space—as a socially recognized socio-spatial institution of belonging, and on ḥadīth al-majlis as interpersonal discourse through which knowledge is collectively created in majlis settings. We foreground relationality, consensus-building, and indirect expression while remaining attentive to the social hierarchies and gendered expectations that shape participation. Drawing on feminist and decolonial scholarship, as well as the authors’ methodological reflections from exploratory and pilot work in the UAE, the article argues that the majlis is not merely a convenient venue for qualitative research but an epistemic setting that reshapes assumptions about knowledge production and research design, ethics, data, and representation. In the women’s majlis, knowledge is created through culturally embedded practices including hospitality, indirect communication, storytelling, humor, silence, embodied presence, and collective interpretation. These practices require qualitative inquiry and ongoing reflection concerning how meaning unfolds through socially recognized norms of belonging, interaction, and power relations. By theorizing culturally grounded research practice from within Emirati women’s social worlds, we contribute to qualitative methodology by offering a framework that is ethically accountable to their lived realities while resisting the homogenizing representations of Emirati women’s experiences common in the literature. The proposed methodology may have relevance for research in the Gulf Region.

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