Why a community engaged approach to research?

In this project, we adopt a community-engaged approach not as a methodological add-on, but as a foundational orientation to knowledge production. This means treating communities not simply as sites of data collection, but as co-producers of insight, perspective, and ethical reflection.

Community engagement, as understood in disciplines like public health, anthropology, and feminist science studies, resists the top-down model of academic research that extracts information and leaves. Instead, it emphasizes reciprocity, accountability, and shared authorship. It asks: Whose voices are centered? Who defines the questions worth asking? Who benefits from the knowledge produced?

In the context of reproductive health and fertility preservation, these questions are urgent. Technologies like IVF, egg freezing, or gamete banking are not only biomedical procedures — they are socially embedded practices, shaped by faith, gender norms, cultural expectations, and political economies of care.

By working with — not merely on — communities, we aim to trace reproductive futures in ways that are:

• Culturally responsive: acknowledging how reproduction is lived and understood within Arab and Islamic moral worlds.

• Ethically grounded: attuned to the dilemmas faced by individuals navigating clinical, familial, and religious terrains.

• Locally meaningful: producing findings that matter not only in academic circles, but in the everyday lives of patients, providers, and families in Qatar and beyond.

This approach also draws on feminist epistemologies, which remind us that situated knowledge — knowledge rooted in lived experience — carries authority and insight that traditional academic expertise often overlooks.

Ultimately, a community-engaged approach helps us ask better questions, build more inclusive conversations, and create space for collaborative imagining — not just of what reproductive futures are, but of what they could be.