Mobile Methodology: Mapping Entrepreneur Abeer Abu Ghaith’s Repertoires of Resistance in the Palestinian Startup Ecosystem

Abstract

In technical and professional communication (TPC) there have been calls to locate the field in transnational contexts. Aligned with the social justice turn in TPC is an emergent body of critical and decolonial scholarship attending to power, privilege, and positionality. The following study extends this scholarship through attention to these issues in an emergent startup ecosystem in the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt). Grounded in mobility studies, this telling case attends to the strategic manner in which a female entrepreneur navigates this system through a process of networking, or knotworking, as she navigates both patriarchal and colonial systems of oppression. Central to this process is the complex way she mobilizes a multimodal and spatial repertoire—conceptualized as repertoires of resistance. These moves shape not only the ways that she traverses the social, semiotic, and geographic landscape, but also the shifting nature of the landscape itself. Methodologically such moves entail a conceptual shift from a focus on activity systems to mobility systems.

Keywords

activity theory actor-network theory workplace writing and literacy qualitative research methods transnational entrepreneurship

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