How can research attend to what is felt, sensed, and shared under conditions of conflict and repression? In classical Arabic, wijdan names an affective consciousness: the heart’s spontaneous encounter with fear, grief, beauty, or clarity. Sharing a root with wujūd (existence) it suggests that feeling is also a mode of being and knowing. Drawing on fieldwork in post-revolutionary Egypt, this entry develops wijdan as an affective methodology that brings bodily sensation, ethical judgment, collective memory, and relationality into one frame, offering a reparative, culturally grounded, and politically resonant approach to inquiry.
