This thesis is based upon ethnographic fieldwork carried out in and around three
secondary schools and Tahrir Square in urban Cairo between October 2009 and
December 2011. It explores the lives of young Egyptians at the time of their
secondary schooling and the Arab spring through examining the contradictions and
ambivalence of the coming of age for middle class young people inside the school
and in the wider everyday life in urban Cairo. This thesis seeks to understand, by
examining the social theory on the tension between structure and agency, the way
through which disciplinarian interventions enable youth’s articulation of critical
dispositions and forms of resistance.
This thesis, whilst it embarks by looking at the deterioration of the formal schooling
system in Egypt after thirty years under Mubarak’s rule, examines the extent to
which the everyday educational studentship circumstances had constrained the sorts
of subjects that Egyptian youth could become and which would constitute them as
young and educated in contemporary Egypt. Whilst education, in its broader
meaning, emerged as being undeniably crucial for young Egyptians’ project for social
mobility, secondary schools are presented not as venues for socialisation or
reproduction of inequalities but rather as an ambivalent and contradictory resource.
The young Egyptians who were the subjects of this thesis negotiated meritocratic
aspirations at the intersections of their transversal educational circumstances, and
the norms of patriarchy and subordination of their wider everyday life. The forms of
exclusion and tension about the future have affected young Egyptians’ articulation of
their critical dispositions of hopelessness and ambivalence. Their engagement in the
Tahrir riots and occupational actions and demanding their right to the city,
manifested their emerging political consciousness and capacity to produce new
spatial meanings and practices