Schooling the Nation
Education and Everyday Politics in Egypt

Uses first-hand accounts from Egyptian schools to show how governance, legitimation and belonging were shaped before and after the 2011 uprising.

Hania Sobhy (Author)

9781108832380, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 23 March 2023

300 pages
23.4 x 15.3 x 1.9 cm, 0.58 kg

'A fascinating in-depth analysis of education, citizenship and belonging in contemporary Egypt based on exceptional ethnographic fieldwork. I have been assigning Sobhy's earlier work in my classes and have seen the engagement and debate it creates among students. Now that the book is out, Schooling the Nation will no doubt become essential reading in graduate and undergraduate courses on the sociology, anthropology and politics of the Middle East and the Global South.' Nadine Adballa, American University in Cairo

Telling the story of the Egyptian uprising through the lens of education, Hania Sobhy explores the everyday realities of citizens in the years before and after the so-called 'Arab Spring'. With vivid narratives from students and staff from Egyptian schools, Sobhy offers novel insights on the years that led to and followed the unrest of 2011. Drawing a holistic portrait of education in Egypt, she reveals the constellations of violence, neglect and marketization that pervaded schools, and shows how young people negotiated the state and national belonging. By approaching schools as key disciplinary and nation-building institutions, this book outlines the various ways in which citizenship was produced, lived, and imagined during those critical years. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Introduction: schools as sites of lived and imagined citizenship
1. The late Mubarak era, education and the research
2. Living the intensities of the privatized state: the functioning and implications of marketization across the system
3. Everyday violence and the dynamics of punishment across the schools
4. Gendered noncompliance and the breakdown of discipline
5. Textbook narratives of nationalism, belonging and citizenship
6. Performing the nation, imagining citizenship: school rituals and oppositional narratives of non-belonging
7. What changed in education since the Revolution? Conclusion: schooling the nation in the shadow of the uprising.

Subject Areas: Constitution: government & the state [JPHC]