During the summer of 2017, I was conducting fieldwork for my doctoral dissertation in Egypt. I interviewed thirty-five Syrian refugee women who, after escaping the conflict in Syria, settled in Egypt and then married Egyptian men. Initially my aim was to compare Syrian refugee women’s narratives with the pervasive, and often unquestioned discourses in social media and humanitarian blogs which “explained away” these women’s marriages to Egyptian nationals as coercion, exploitation, and at times forced marriage. It took a while, but I soon came to realize that the stories and reasons of the “Syrian refugee brides” were much more complex that either discourses allowed. Throughout the planning phase, and as a self-proclaimed anti-colonial researcher, I was consumed by the idea of the crisis of representation: the gap between the author’s (often colonized) text and the lived experiences of the researched population. In addition to my empirical interest in the stories behind the “Syrian refugee brides,” I was also interested in theoretical and methodological questions such as how do hegemonic ideas affect academic research? Which narratives and ideas, and whose narratives and ideas, are more privileged? How do the researcher’s social location, ideological motivations, and theoretical convictions determine how the message is going to be received? How do factors such as academic privilege implicate knowledge production? How do the varying cultural, social, and intellectual references between the researcher and the researched contribute to the loss of meanings? Like any researcher in a Western academic institution, I had to start with a clear hypothesis about how the fieldwork “fits” within previous literature and dominate theories. My initial/official interest was to explore how Syrian women interpret their decision to marry Egyptian men: How did they use marriage as a survival tool? And how do elements such as agency, exploitation, and patriarchy affect this decision? However, as I arrived to the field, my concern about the academic privileged and countering hegemonic ideas about non-Western contexts started to dominate my approach. I was slowly letting go of my initial questions and cautiously letting my respondents’ narratives lead the way and explore more interesting avenues and dimensions of their stories. What I have come to realize is that in addition to exploring how the concept of marriage has been used creatively and flexibly to promote the woman’s interest, another emerging question was how those...