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An ethnographic account of the rise of international schooling in Egypt.
Learning to Be Egyptian examines how the rise of international schooling in Egypt has recentered longstanding anxieties about the cultivation of national belonging in elite education. Building on twenty months of fieldwork conducted in and around Cairo's international schools between 2016 and 2022, the book follows parents, teachers, and students as they navigate a tension between the cosmopolitan appeal of international education, on the one hand, and cultural expectations of national socialization, on the other. In doing so, Noha Roushdy's fine-grained ethnographic account challenges the dominant association of international education with a cosmopolitan flexibility toward national and ethnic boundaries. By tracing the individual and collective work that goes into the making of a globalizing yet local elite, Learning to Be Egyptian instead shows how international schools can become incubators for the reproduction of decidedly rigid conceptions of class, gender, and national belonging.
"Learning to Be Egyptian contributes to a thin but growing body of anthropological and sociological literature on schools in the Middle East that centers the experiences of students, teachers, and families. Drawing upon rich ethnographic research in and around international schools, Roushdy considers public discourses surrounding elite education and national belonging while centering the experiences of young people in these schools as they make sense of their place in an Egyptian society significantly reconfigured by decades of neoliberal economic restructuring. Roushdy not only rethinks the pedagogies of national belonging that are typically associated with schooling but shows how both gender and class are integral to the formation of elite subjectivities in these new educational spaces." — Fida J. Adely, author of Working Women in Jordan: Education, Migration, and Aspiration
Noha Roushdy is a Lecturer in the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies at the University of Bern.