Schooling the Nation

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.

Hania Sobhy is a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity (MPI-MMG). Her research focuses on the politics of education, electoral mobilization and Islamism. She has been published in World Development, Nations & Nationalism and Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education. She has worked in education development since 2004 and is a regular contributor to the Egyptian daily, al-Shorouk.