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)

9781108958332, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 29 May 2025

284 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.5 cm, 0.415 kg

'Sobhy's work, through its reflection on permissiveness, the erosion of disciplinary institutions, noncompliance and the incoherence of legitimation narratives, offers new avenues for elucidating the dynamics of state functioning in the neoliberal context and offers, beyond an ethnographic analysis of the education system, an enlightening and disturbing perspective on current Egypt.' Farah Ramzy, Mondes Arabes

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]