Schooling the Nation Education and Everyday Politics in Egypt

Announced by the University of Pittsburgh PLEASE NOTE THE EVENT WILL TAKE PLACE AT 10 AM PST

Schooling the Nation examines how citizenship was lived and imagined by young people in the years before and after the Arab uprisings. Based on rare access to Egyptian secondary schools from 2008 to 2018, the book dissects the constellations of marketization, noncompliance and violence that define Egypt’s ‘permissive-repressive neoliberalism’, and illustrates how young women and men construct the state, negotiate national belonging, imagine Islamic legitimacy and reproduce textbook narratives of citizenship in this historical juncture. The book is also available Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Hania Sobhy is a Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity (MPI MMG) in Germany. She works on education, citizenship and contentious politics. Her current project focuses on teachers, inequality, citizenship and protest in Egyptian, Lebanese and Tunisian education. She studied political science and economics at McGill University in Montreal and the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. She was previously based in Aix-en-Provence, Berlin, Cairo and Beirut.
Discussant: Gehad Abaza (UCSB)
Gehad Abaza is a doctoral candidate in the Anthropology department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Abaza’s research interests include forced migration and refugee studies, the anthropology of statecraft, violence, and processes of racialization. Before pursuing a PhD, Abaza was a freelance journalist based in Cairo.