It was a mellow winter afternoon and time for practical classes in a boys’ technical secondary school in eastern Cairo. The class I was joining was moving for a geometrical drawing lesson in the workshop (which was simply a larger classroom with a different arrangement of desks and no additional equipment). Working at his desk, the teacher did not appear to pay much attention to us. The few students who had arrived started chatting quietly as they gradually took out their notebooks. More students trickled in, and some left again. The teacher was still working at his desk, but as another student who had just come in started to walk out of the classroom, the teacher got up, moved toward him and began beating and cursing him using various obscene phrases. He hit him on the back, head and face and kicked or beat other students who were in his reach near the entrance to the workshop. The student who had received most of the violence seemed to be about to cry. His attempts to protest the teacher’s insults were met with more insults. The teacher did not explain the reasons for this punishment, but it was presumably a reaction to the tardiness and disorder on the part of the students. The teacher returned to his desk, albeit after hurling a few more insults, this time directed at all the students. He did not note down any of their names or take any further disciplinary measures against other students who had arrived late or without notebooks. He talked briefly to the class, tasking them with copying a drawing from the blackboard using a method that most of them did not understand. Throughout the rest of the class, the students chatted quietly – with me and with each other – as some of them attempted to copy the drawing while others did not. The teacher continued what he was doing at his desk and did not monitor or assist them, even by explaining the lesson at hand. Later, a photocopied exam question from a previous year that was being circulated among the students arrived at our table. The students understood that this would be the question they would find in their next exam, and some began to discuss arrangements for obtaining a copy of the model answer so that they could paste it into their notebooks, which they would take into the exam hall to replicate the model answer on the exam paper.

This narrative could be read as an example of authoritarian Arab education, demonstrating the power of an absolutist teacher subduing students who do not have the right to speak. It offers a rather poor example of an authoritarian classroom, however, since the students come and go as they please; only some are punished for being late, while most spend the class time chatting and expect to be able to cheat in exams. It might be difficult to think of such a school as a disciplinary institution at all, given that the official regulations relating to attendance, order, instruction, punishment and the integrity of the examination are thoroughly violated. The narrative could also be read as a snapshot of everyday realities pre-figuring the Revolutionary moment of 2011, where the role and authority of agents and institutions of the state disintegrates and the breakdown of the social contract becomes vividly manifest. This book approaches such narratives as expressions of a “permissive-repressive neoliberalism” that has been long in the making in Egypt and appears in emergent forms elsewhere in the region and in the global South.

Egypt was recently ranked the second worst country in the world in terms of students’ reading abilities (Mullis et al. Reference Mullis, Martin, Foy and Hooper2017). Indeed, over the past few decades, Egyptian public education has deteriorated from relatively high standards to varieties of negligence, chaos and violence. The book examines the causes, manifestations and implications of this deterioration. It tracks the forms of privatization and austerity that have reshaped public services in Egypt. It unpacks the critical place of everyday violence in Egypt’s version of neoliberalism, as applied to young men in particular and the majority of less-privileged Egyptians more generally. Parallel to unpacking the disciplinary role of schools, the book tracks the transformation of their legitimation roles as institutions of nation-building and the production of hegemony. Under British colonialism, Egyptian schools were critical arenas for the struggle for independence, and in the postcolonial era they were considered powerful vehicles for socializing the young into state socialism and Arab nationalism. Their role and status continued to decline throughout the Mubarak era. In the brief democratic opening that followed the unprecedented mass uprising of 2011, students tore down photos of the deposed president in schools, and references to the Mubaraks were purged from official textbooks. After the removal of the elected Muslim Brotherhood president in 2013, military personnel oversaw the performance of a pro-army song in morning assemblies across the country and “Intellectual Security Clubs” were to be established in schools, with the expressed aim of combatting Islamist extremism.

As such, the book studies the production of lived and imagined citizenship in Egypt in the critical years before and after the 2011 uprising. It uses schools to tell the story of Egypt’s uprising in terms of the relationship of the state with urban educated youth in particular. Based on rare access to Egyptian schools, it investigates the everyday realities and official projects of “schooling the nation” in Egypt from the late Mubarak era to the early years after the uprising. It dissects the constellations of violence and marketization that define everyday governance immediately before and after the uprising and contrasts official narratives and rituals of legitimation to citizenship discourses among young men and women. In rich narratives and detailed portraits, it presents vivid repertoires of experiencing the state, living citizenship and performing the nation in this critical historical moment. Drawing from traditions in political science, sociology, anthropology and education, this book employs an immersed interdisciplinary approach that fills a critical gap in studies of citizenship, subjectivation, neoliberalism and belonging in Egypt, the region and the Global South.

As detailed in Chapter 1, I conducted the first phase of the research from 2008 to 2010, spending close to 500 hours inside six boys’ and girls’ secondary schools across Greater Cairo and interviewing about 150 students, teachers and principals. I studied not only the academic track (the famous thanawiya ‘amma) in public and private schools, where the nation’s middle classes and cultural elite have traditionally enrolled, but also the understudied track of technical schools that enroll more than half of secondary students. I analyze citizenship narratives in textbooks across the different tracks from the late Mubarak era to the present. I revisited the main research themes in interviews with over 60 students, teachers and experts from 2016 to 2018, mapping the key changes in school relations, textbook discourses and nationalist rituals in the early post-uprising period. In the analysis of this material, I weave in novel quantitative analysis of the sector, relevant poems and raps songs shared by students, and analyze statements and incidents that have stirred public debate. Through this extensive research with young men and women from across the economic spectrum, and analysis of official textbooks and nationalist rituals, I draw out the ways in which schools bring to focus changing dynamics of governance, legitimation, belonging and contestation.

Key Arguments

The book makes three sets of claims relating to everyday governance under neoliberalism, schools as disciplinary institutions and the role of schools in regime legitimation. The first overarching argument relates to what I call permissive-repressive neoliberalism. Permissive-repressive neoliberalism constitutes an idiosyncratic expression of the punitive and deinstitutionalizing aspects of neoliberalism as a global phenomenon, especially as manifested outside of the affluent Global North (Conclusion chapter). I argue that the modes of lived citizenship that affect the majority of urban youth are characterized by the formal and informal marketization of public services (Chapter 2) and a delicate balancing act between repression and “permissiveness” that erodes the disciplinary power of public institutions (Chapters 3 and 4). I stress the ways in which repressive-permissive marketization works differently across classes and how differentially it impacts young men and women. To understand how the Egyptian regime governs, and how neoliberalism works, it is therefore essential to appreciate that in tandem with the state’s withdrawal from service provision, there are the promises of petty corruption, the perks of extralegal informality and the threats of varieties of emotional and physical violence. It is not only the market but also repression and permissiveness that fill the vacuum created by the withdrawal of the state.

The second set of arguments relates to the functioning of schools as disciplinary institutions and their role in the creation of neoliberal citizens (Chapter 4 and Conclusion). If Foucault saw modern schooling as a quintessential disciplinary institution, a manifestation of the transition from monarchical repression to disciplinary power relations, these impoverished schools show us no such progression. Neither do they show a simple regression from discipline to repression. There is little in the realities of the majority of schools in Egypt that aligns with assumptions about the school as a disciplinary institution or its role in the production of docile citizens. In the bulk of disadvantaged schools, Foucault’s three key disciplinary techniques of observation, normalization and examination are subverted by boys and girls, through rampant truancy, widespread cheating and violations of norms of gender control. Instead of disciplinary techniques, various forms of violence and permissiveness permeate school relations. Such schools do nonetheless produce subjects who are hierarchized, categorized, surveilled, gendered, classed and in different relationships with dominant economic, nationalist and religious imaginaries. These permissive-repressive spaces therefore invite a different engagement with notions of discipline and new ways of analyzing disciplinary institutions (Conclusion).

The third set of arguments concerns the dynamics of legitimation as reflected in official textbooks, school rituals and student discourses. The narratives of official textbooks before the uprising bring to the fore the weak attempts at regime legitimation that stem from a form of depoliticization that avoids key ideological questions while consistently deploying narratives of religious legitimation (Chapter 5). Nationalist rituals in schools illustrate even greater disinterest in legitimation. In the dysfunctional institutions of the privatized state, the nation has no regular audience and often ceases to be ritualistically performed (Chapter 6). The results of this disinvestment in legitimation are manifest in the absence of even modest levels of reproduction of the official narratives of the regime among youth. Love, loyalty, sacrifice for the nation and other key themes of official narratives of citizenship all find little resonance in student discourses. School narratives crystallize the weak inculcation of a neoliberal ethic and the fragility of attempts at nationalist and Islamist legitimation among the younger generations (Chapter 6). The changes introduced in the tumultuous post-uprising years expose the limitations in using schools and textbooks as tools for the consolidation of regime legitimacy (Chapter 7). Permissive-repressive governance therefore spills over into the ways in which the regime legitimizes itself. In parallel with repressive controls on freedom of expression, permissive governance leaves little space for consistent efforts to ensure adherence to the official political line, even in key institutions like schools.

The rest of this chapter lays out the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of the study, situating it in relation to the relevant works on Egypt and the region. It outlines the approach of studying the production of lived and imagined citizenship in schools. It identifies the key parameters for studying lived citizenship in schools in terms of the focus on privatization and austerity on the one hand, and violence and discipline on the others. It charts how the research investigates the production of imagined citizenship in schools through analysis of textbook discourses, rituals and everyday student and teacher narratives. It situates the study within the sociology and anthropology of education, and ends with a map of the subsequent chapters.

Approach and Key Themes

A set of diverse bodies of literature and methodological traditions inform this study. Its approach is neither solely embedded in political economy nor wholly immersed in ethnography and sociology, but rather reads these traditions together.Footnote ¹ This is a political ethnography that uses schooling to understand differentiated lived citizenship and the construction and contestation of imagined citizenship. It brings the study of neoliberalism as an articulation of state, market and citizenship (Wacquant Reference Wacquant2012) into the concrete space of schools. The modern school has been intimately tied to the functions of the state, from the control of urban populations and the construction of modern armies to the consolidation of nation-states and the crafting of unified national identities (Katz Reference Katz1995, Jones and Williamson Reference Jones and Williamson1979, Hunter Reference Hunter, Barry, Osborne and Rose1996). Ethnographic investigation into schools excavates the differentiated lived realities of citizenship within a changing political economy. Textbooks, rituals and everyday school narratives bring to focus key tropes of imagined citizenship and the contestations around them. Inquiry into both lived and imagined citizenship corresponds to the dual roles of schools as disciplinary and nation-building institutions. It also corresponds to the duality of everyday governance and legitimation that runs across the chapters, or of power and legitimacy in Bourdieu’s terms (Reference Bourdieru1996). As Bourdieu wrote, “the sociology of education lies at the foundation of a general anthropology of power and legitimacy” (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieru1996, 5).

This form of inquiry responds to a number of gaps in the literature. Lila Abu Lughod’s assertion that “economic anthropology has hardly been done in the Middle East” (Reference Walker1989, 299) remains true over two decades later (Elyachar Reference Elyachar and Altorki2015, 426). We have little ethnography of either violence or markets in the Middle East (Elyachar Reference Elyachar and Altorki2015). Aside from Lisa Wedeen’s work on Syria, we also have little work on everyday legitimation. Everyday governance and legitimation both remain understudied. Nonetheless, this work follows in the footsteps of an important body of political ethnographies on contemporary Egypt. This includes the seminal works of Diane Singerman (Reference Singerman1995), Julia Elyachar (Reference Elyachar2005), Lila Abu-Lughod (Reference Abu-Lughod2005), Salwa Ismail (Reference Isin, Turner, Isin and Turner2006), Asef Bayat (Reference Bayat2010) and Farha Ghannam (Reference Ghannam2002, Reference Ghannam2013). While sharing with these works the goal and approach of understanding politics from below, it also compares experiences across different social classes and examines nationalist discourses from above and their reverberations in the everyday. It does this by studying the dynamics of a very particular kind of institution: schools.

The focus on schools in itself addresses key gaps in the literature on Egypt, and on education and citizenship in the region and the Global South. While political ethnographies of education are well established in the Global North, only a limited body of ethnographic studies conducted in the Global South have approached the entanglement of schools with the production of political subjectivities and the construction of citizens (Levinson Reference Levinson2001, Lulyx Reference Lulyx1999, Benei Reference Benei2008). In the Middle East, despite an interest in how education relates to economic, social and political reform, studies of education have long overlooked individual experiences and sociopolitical practices at the school level (Mazawi 2002). The works of Roozbeh Shirazi (Reference Shirazi2012, Reference Shirazi2016), Fida Adely (Reference Adely2012) and Charis Boutieri (Reference Boutieri2016) on Jordan and Morocco are important exceptions. In a rare focus on masculinity, schooling and belonging, Shirazi (Reference Shirazi2012, Reference Shirazi2016) excavates how the top-down efforts to produce a particular national identity in Jordan have engendered a performative kind of citizenship in schools in which students interrogate official accounts of Jordanian-ness. Also focused on Jordan, Adely’s (Reference Adely2012) Gendered Paradoxes brings to focus how young people in a girls’ public school grapple with nationalism and national identity, faith, the requisites of pious living, appropriate and respectable gender roles, and progress. Charis Boutieri’s (Reference Boutieri2016) Learning in Morocco dissects how students and teachers navigate the linguistic and cultural tensions implicated in the contemporary shaping of identity and belonging, modes of governance, and the management of public resources in Morocco. With regard to Egypt in particular, a number of seminal works have touched on the production of citizenship in schools, albeit in the colonial era. Mona Russell highlights how the British maintained their rule by teaching submission through religion and reinforcing British hegemony in history and geography classes (Russell Reference Russell2002). In his Colonising Egypt (1991), Timothy Mitchell devoted considerable attention to the introduction to Egypt of Joseph Lancaster’s model school as part of the colonial enterprise of creating order out of indigenous chaos.Footnote ² He noted, however, that schools and universities “were always liable to become centres of some kind of revolt, turning the colonisers’ methods of instruction and discipline into the means of organised opposition” (Reference Mitchell1991, 171).Footnote ³ Indeed, Lisa Pollard explains how, as the Egyptians’ struggle against British occupation intensified, the educational system became a means through which notions of “the nation,” its history, its future and its characteristics were cultivated (Reference Pollard2005).

The dearth of rigorous ethnographic or immersed studies of contemporary education in Egypt is in large part the result of restrictions on research access to schools. Notable exceptions in English include the works of Gregory Starrett and Linda Herrera. The case studies in Herrera and Torres’ (Reference Herrera and Torres2006) edited volume, Cultures of Arab Schooling, including the work of Kamal Naguib, Iman Farag and Ahmed Youssof Saad, represented a critical opening in the anthropology and sociology of education in Egypt. The more recent compilation by Dorio, Abdou and Moheyeldine (Reference Dorio, Abdou and Moheyeldine2019) centers the narratives, spaces, and forms of citizenship education prior to and in the aftermath of the 2011 Revolution. Beyond ethnographic work, key scholars, including Kamal Naguib, Kamal Mugheith, Hassan Bilawi and Shibl Badran, have written extensively in Arabic on various aspects of education, democracy and inequality. I build on these seminal works in seeking to deepen and expand investigations into education and citizenship.

Lived and Imagined Citizenship

I structure the analysis across the book around the notions of “lived” and “imagined” citizenship. In this, I build on the growing global literature that has nuanced the study of citizenship in its lived, differentiated and enacted dimensions. If one body of literature on citizenship relates to the formal rights and responsibilities guaranteed by virtue of being a citizen in a state, the second highlights the constant struggle of the marginalized to expose the violence inherent in their exclusion (Berlant Reference Berlant, Ahmed, Kilby, Lury, McNeil and Skeggs2000). As Isin and Turner (Reference Isin and Turner2002, 4) explain, contemporary citizenship theory constructs citizenship not simply in terms of legal rights but “as a social process through which individuals and social groups engage in claiming, expanding or losing rights,” which has led “to a sociologically informed definition of citizenship in which the emphasis is less on legal rules and more on norms, practices, meanings, and identities.”

Lived citizenship underlines how the differentiated rights, duties and meanings of citizenship are experienced in the everyday. Legalistic approaches do not “readily admit to degrees of citizenship or allow an appreciation of qualitative differences in the lived experience of citizenship” (Hall, Coffey and Williamson 1999, 504). Lived citizenship, on the other hand, refers to “the meaning that citizenship actually has in people’s lives and the ways in which people’s social and cultural backgrounds and material circumstances affect their lives as citizens” (Hall and Williamson Reference Hall and Williamson1999, 2). These conceptions are especially relevant for the context and comparative approach of this book. This kind of dynamic, process-oriented understanding of rights is more helpful in contexts “where rights are under-developed or are under threat or for groups who are denied full citizenship rights” (Lister Reference Lister2007, 695). Differentiated citizenships (Holsten Reference Holsten2008) “mark out radically different terrains, forms, styles and meanings of engagement with the state depending on class, race, gender ethnicity, age and other dimensions of difference” (Cornwall, Robins and von Liers Reference Cornwall, Robins and von Liers2011, 11).

Scholars have however differed on how to disaggregate the broad notion of citizenship. For Delanty, citizenship “as membership of a political community involves a set of relationships between rights, duties, participation and identity” (Reference Delanty2000, 9). For Ruth Lister, lived citizenship “is about how individuals understand and negotiate the three key elements of citizenship: rights and responsibilities, belonging and participation” (Lister et al. Reference Lister2007, 168). I take a different approach in disaggregating the elements of citizenship. First, I do not treat participation as a separate category from rights and responsibilities, as participation also entails sets of rights and responsibilities. Second, I disaggregate the rights and responsibilities of citizenship into the four interrelated parameters of protection, provision, participation and legitimation. The classic work of T. H. Marshall (Reference Marshall, Marshall and Bottomore1992) disaggregates citizenship into the civil, social and political rights that define the relationship between individuals and the state.Footnote ⁴ The “3Ps” of protection, provision and participation expand on the Marshallian categories of civil, social and political rights in ways that speak to contexts of authoritarianism, informality and clientelism (Sobhy Reference Sobhy2021, 2–3).Footnote ⁵ I add a fourth parameter: “the production of hegemony” that refers to the narratives and practices that legitimize the parameters of citizenship, in the media, in schools and beyond (Sobhy Reference Sobhy2021). In brief, “[p]rotection encompasses the most basic civil rights, law and order and national security, provision refers to social rights, public services and economic opportunities, participation captures representation and political rights and freedoms,” while the fourth parameter indicates the representations of identity and values that legitimize the obligations of the state and citizens (Sobhy Reference Sobhy2021, 11, Diagram 1). As such, I approach citizenship as the rights, responsibilities and meanings that connect subjects to their polity, along the four parameters (4Ps) of protection, provision, participation and legitimation.

Third, I make a distinction between the lived experience of citizenship and the imagined dimension relating to constructions of citizenship and notions of belonging. I approach lived citizenship as the differentiated experiences of the rights and responsibilities of protection, provision, participation and legitimation. Imagined citizenship, on the other hand, refers to the political values and identities that give meaning to and legitimize rights and responsibilities vis-à-vis the polity. Representations of citizenship can be official, state sponsored, popular, mediated or everyday discourses. They are produced, negotiated and contested by various social forces in narratives and images that stem from and produce political emotions. The existence of multiple constructions of citizenship in any context is implied in the notion of citizenship as open to contestation and “fundamentally about political struggles over the capacity to constitute ourselves as a political subject” (Isin and Nyers Reference Isin, Nyers, Isin and Nyers2014, 8). Constructions of national identity and political values are central to imagined citizenship. Narratives of collective identity, history and destiny permeate constructions of citizenship and shape representations of belonging. The notion of political values refers to overarching normative principles and belief assumptions about government, citizenship and society, such as egalitarianism, civil liberties, ethnocentrism and limited government (McCann Reference McCann1997; Schwartz, Caprara and Vecchione Reference Schwartz, Caprara and Vecchione2010). Imagined citizenship therefore includes politically relevant values on individual, religious, cultural, gender, economic and environmental rights and responsibilities. Emotions have long been recognized as fundamental to political identity, citizenship and national identity (Goodwin, Jasper and Poletta Reference Goodwin, Jasper and Polletta2001; Nicholson Reference Nicholson1999; Marcus Reference Marcus2002; Marcus, Neuman and McKuen Reference Marcus, Neuman and McKuen2002, Zembylas Reference Zembylas2009). Imagined citizenship is animated by the different emotions of love, belonging, ambivalence, indignation or humiliation that are oriented by lived citizenship.

These notions of lived and imagined citizenship are deployed to investigate into how subjects differently live, imagine and enact their relationship with the state. Schools are concrete spaces that bring to light many of these lived and imagined elements. Schools are centrally involved in the processes through which young people develop their sense of belonging and learn the meanings and practices of citizenship (Abu El-Haj et al. Reference Abu El-Haj, Bonet, Demerath and Schultz2011). In exploring lived citizenship in schools, I address the 4Ps of protection, provision, participation and the production of hegemony. The constitutional right to free public education itself is a clear provision right, which I examine in relation to access, quality and equity of provision, focusing in particular by centering the question of the marketization of educational provision. Rights to participation in schools are investigated in relation to school activities and rituals and to the right to voice complaints and political opinions. Rights to protection are approached in relation to the protection from physical and emotional harm and discrimination, as well as the application of school regulation, including the integrity of examinations. The production of hegemony is addressed in terms of the promotion of dominant values, identities and forms of belonging in school rituals and classroom relations. I study schools to bring to focus how rights along the 3Ps are differentiated, enacted and denied and how the production of dominant identities and values is lived and contested in everyday school relations. In exploring constructions of imagined citizenship in schools, I examine official textbooks, school rituals and the narratives of students, teachers and administrators. Finally, I draw out the connections between lived and imagined citizenship and between official constructions of citizenship and everyday articulations. This treatment of citizenship is therefore quite distinct from the way in which citizenship is often discussed in educational research, where the focus is on developing citizenship textbooks and programs, especially with the aim of promoting active or multicultural citizenship. It is also distinct from how citizenship/muwatana is used in public discourse in Egypt, which is mainly to refer to minority rights, especially those of Egyptian Christians who make up about 10 percent of the population. Thematically, the analysis centres the three most salient elements of lived and imagined citizenship in the Egyptian case: informal privatization, violent punishment and nationalist legitimation.

Lived Citizenship in Schools: Markets, Violence and Discipline

Imagined Citizenship in Schools: Textbooks, Rituals and Everyday Narratives

Promoting national belonging, patriotism and political socialization into dominant narratives are essential to the institution of mass education. Since the inception of the nation-state, political education has been bound up with the project of nation-building, and the inculcation of patriotism has been widely regarded as a primary purpose of mass schooling (Callan Reference Callan2004, 77). Imagined citizenship as nurtured in schools is studied along three axes: textbooks as reservoirs of official narratives, nationalist rituals as choreographed embodiments of their key tropes, and everyday relations, activities and discourses in schools as modes of appropriation and negotiation of these official narratives.

Textbooks can serve as a means of examining official narratives and changing power relations in society (Bernstein Reference Bernstein and Youn1971, Apple and Christian-Smith Reference Apple, Christian-Smith, Apple and Christian-Smith1991) through the ways they channel the narratives, knowledge and values that are considered appropriate and important to emphasize to young people by groups in control of textbook authorship and production. They also reflect the changes over time in the discourses promoted by powerful groups. Official narratives in authoritarian states may be viewed with suspicion, privately ridiculed or ignored but may also become hegemonic insofar as they interface with popular imaginaries, as Alia Mossallam’s work (Reference Wacquant2012) in relation to Nasserist Egypt underlines. Because textbooks in Egypt are centrally developed by the Ministry of Education (MOE) and unified across all schools, they represent a critical resource for studying official state-sponsored discourses directed at the majority of Egyptians enrolled in national education. In presenting ideals of citizenship, Egyptian textbooks have attempted to promote values and orientations linked to dominant ideologies, whether state socialism, the market economy, or neoliberal orientations.

In 2006, the mission statement of Egyptian preuniversity education highlighted the aim of providing students with skills for “active citizenship,” a term that is closely linked with neoliberal notions of citizenship. For Nikolas Rose, the concept of “active citizenship” limits citizenship to consumers who are “active” only in the choices they can make about their own self-regulation (Reference Rose1999, 164). In this framework, citizenship is reconceptualized away from a “rights” focus toward individuals who adapt to precarious labor conditions and take advantage of market opportunities. As Wendy Brown puts it, neoliberalism has reduced citizenship “to an unprecedented degree of political passivity and complacency” (Brown Reference Brown2005, 43). Neoliberal citizenship necessitates a particular conception and relationship to social services and the state. I excavate the ways in which changing official narratives since the 1970s are reflected in textbook constructions of citizenship and nationalism, as well as portrayals of the president, young people and citizens, nationalist struggles, ideological currents, historical heritage and national renaissance and decline (Chapter 5). Despite textbooks being centralized and unified, I indicate the nuanced and varied ways in which official narratives are translated across textbooks for different subjects and academic tracks, reflecting the competing influences that shape official discourses (Chapters 5 and 7).

Rituals in schools are also key sites of citizenship-making and nation-building. A significant body of literature has focused on ritual and other school activities in the construction of collective identities (McLaren Reference McLaren1999, Bjork Reference Bjork2002, Bekerman Reference Bekerman2003, Ben-Amos and Bet-El Reference Ben-Amos and Bet-El1999, Adely Reference Adely, Mazawi and Sultana2010). Such activities play a role “in socializing members of school communities, communicating to them what the institution values most highly, and building a sense of cohesion amongst students, teachers, and administrators” (Bjork Reference Bjork2002, 466). Nationalist rituals, in particular, are meant to serve as arenas “where collective national selfhood is enacted” (Berezin Reference Berezin, Goodwin, Jasper and Polletta2001, 93). The power of nationalist rituals, especially under authoritarian regimes, is a central preoccupation in the literature on authoritarianism, particularly the way in which they may function as a disciplinary device to reveal dissenters and as an opportunity to signal passive compliance (Havel Reference Havel and Vadislav1986, Wedeen Reference Wedeen1998, Reference Wedeen1999, Reference Wedeen2015).

Nationalist rituals in schools are critical for promoting official narratives and national belonging because they embody notions and myths of national identity that include or exclude, as well as norms and values that are normalized, contested or resisted (see Bjork Reference Bjork2002, Ben-Amos and Bet-El Reference Ben-Amos and Bet-El1999, Adely Reference Adely, Mazawi and Sultana2010). The patriotic morning assembly ritual is common to many educational systems across the world and most Arab schools. Scholars like Véronique Benei (Reference Benei2008) have focused on how schoolchildren create their physical selves through morning liturgies while enacting and embodying the nation into existence, revealing the sensory production and daily manufacture of nationhood, belonging and citizenship. I approach the daily morning assembly (tabur) in Egyptian schools as a key space for the emotional experience and physical enactment and performance of national belonging. However, rather than asking how the nation becomes “this natural object of devotion” (Benei Reference Benei2008, 72), I investigate the ways in which secondary-school students may avoid or subvert these rituals, or receive them with boredom, nonchalance, ridicule or indignant obscenity, in constellations of emotions and bodily procedures that also constitute modes of performing the nation.

Promoting love and belonging to the nation (al-hub wal-intima’ lil-watan) is one of the principal goals of Egyptian education and is often explicitly highlighted in policy documents, in the prefaces of textbooks and in their content.Footnote ⁷ If survey data is to be believed, we might conclude that the Egyptian education system has been incredibly successful in achieving its goal of promoting national belonging. In a 2010 nationwide survey, 85 percent of young people expressed a readiness to go to war in defense of Egypt, while 71 percent said they were proud of their Egyptian identity, placing Egypt fifth in international comparisons of young people’s pride in national belonging, well above the international average of 58 percent (UNDP Reference Sobhy2010, 67–74). My research with students and teachers, however, reveals a more complex picture, accentuated by the rupture of the 2011 uprising (Chapters 6, 7 and Conclusion). Through classroom observations and interviews, I examine the ways in which students reflect on national belonging and how their articulations differ across class and gender, underlining the ways in which they implicitly and explicitly construct citizenship, diagnose social problems and portray Egypt vis-à-vis other nations. I trace how students interact with neoliberal and Islamist citizenship narratives, and raise questions around the blurred boundaries between narratives of responsibilizing, entitlement, clientelism and citizenship (Chapter 6).

Although my focus on schools acknowledges the romance between states and education that constitutes one of modernity’s central features (Green Reference Green1997), schools are by no means the only sites where students are exposed to constructions of citizenship, the state and the nation. Indeed, other technologies of political communication, from television to the Internet, compete with rituals and textbooks in the production of national identities (Berezin Reference Berezin, Goodwin, Jasper and Polletta2001). Young Egyptians learn about nationhood and citizenship through popular soap operas, religious satellite channels, music videos, cassette sermons, youth magazines and various social media. As Lila Abu-Lughod has shown, “television is a key institution for the production of national culture in Egypt,” having been used by the government as a tool of citizen education since the 1960s (Reference Abu-Lughod2005, 7–10). Feature films, Arab satellite channels, private Egyptian channels and social media no doubt play a major role in shaping the political imaginaries of Egyptians (Chapter 6). Schools, however, remain the spaces where most Egyptian citizens have an extended experience of the state. The point is not to argue that either schools or the media are more powerful resources for constructing identity, but rather to examine the kinds of power they have (Levinson Reference Levinson1999), and to treat them as arenas for the expression of different citizenship realities and narratives. Examining textbooks reveals not student identities but how the intentions of agents of the state are translated, while looking inside schools allows us to understand not their overwhelming power, but the contestations within them, the citizenship discourses of young people and their lived experiences of the state. My focus on schools is therefore premised not on an assumption that they shape national identity in univocal ways, but that as key institutions where citizenship is lived and imagined, they are critical locations for understanding the nature and impact of dominant disciplinary and nation-building projects.

Studying Citizenship and Subjectivation in Schools

Exploring how the school produces citizenship or creates neoliberal or other kinds of subjectivities is guided by how we understand the power of institutions to shape discourses, practices and subjectivities. Key social theorists have addressed the internationalization of social control as a central question in their work, including Pierre Bourdieu, Norbert Elias, Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault. For these thinkers, the school is one of the key institutions in which modern subjects are created. There are significant differences, however, in the ways scholars have understood how schools teach students these critical lessons and in how this influence can be studied. Various constructs such as the hidden curriculum, reproduction, habitus, socialization, subjectivation and disciplinary power have been used to understand the relationship between institutions and the shaping of the discourses and practices of those subject to their power.

A common thread among these thinkers is that schools teach young people about their position in society. Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (Reference Foucault1977) and History of Sexuality Volume 1 (Reference Foucault1990 [1977]) in particular “show how the subject is subjected to relations of power as she/he is individualized, categorized, classified, hierarchized, normalized, surveilled and provoked to self-surveillance. These are technologies of subjection brought into play within institutions that … improvise, cite and circulate discursive frames and coterminous technologies that render subjects in relations of power” (Youdell Reference Youdell2006b, 518). Once the individual “comes to know what to expect as ‘normal’ through the dominant regimes of truth that circulate in schooling, she actually constructs herself – and is constructed – through particular speech acts that are the effects of these dominant discursive practices” (Kohli Reference Kienle1999, 323). Schools produce students who not only study specific subject matter but also “learn how to embody raced, classed, and gendered realities” (Morris Reference Morris2005, 28). Explicit content therefore matters less than “the cultural rules embodied in what is taught and how it is taught: those implicit rules that define what is true, what is relevant, what is normal, what is valuable, and who has the right to give voice to a particular discourse” (Donald Reference Donald1992, 46). The categories and norms in schools create a kind of first template from which future political acts emerge, develop and diverge. As Wacquant puts it, the state “lives ‘in here,’ ineffaceably engraved in all of us in the form of the state sanctioned mental categories acquired via schooling through which we cognitively construct the social world, so that we already consent to its dictates prior to committing any ‘political’ act” (Reference Wacquant and Wacquant2005, 17).

This study is particularly concerned with schooling as a differentiated experience along salient parameters of social difference. One of the major differences between Bourdieu’s approach and those of Foucault and Elias, for example, is “Bourdieu’s focus on social class and stratification, showing that socialization processes and educational institutions work in different ways for different segments of the population” (Reed-Danahay Reference Reed-Danahay2005, 63). Scholars of the political economy and sociology of education have long been concerned with how public schools impart different types of educational experience and curriculum knowledge to students according to social class (Bowles and Gintis Reference Bowles and Gintis1976, Bernstein Reference Bernstein1977, Bourdieu and Passeron Reference Bourdieu and Passeron1990, Apple Reference Apple1979, Anyon Reference Anyon and Gress1988, Da Silva Reference Da Silva1988, Hempel-Jorgensen Reference Hempel-Jorgensen2009, Ivinson and Duveen Reference Ivinson, Duveen, Moore, Arnot, Beck and Daniels2006). One of the key themes in this literature is that children of the subordinate classes are taught, through the manifest and hidden curricula of school, the virtues of compliance and submission to direct orders, while the children of petty-bourgeois and bourgeois origins are socialized in school to be autonomous and to internalize control, thus predisposing children to fit into certain positions in the occupational structure. Other studies of youth culture and schooling, such as Paul Willis’ Learning to Labour (Reference Willis1977), emphasized working-class resistance to dominant culture, while later work sought to nuance theoretical and methodological treatment of class, culture and resistance (Watson Reference Watson1993, Davies Reference Davies1995). More broadly, the critical sociology of education has been “underpinned by concerns about the role that schools play in the reproduction of inequitable social relations along axes of class, gender, race, and, more recently, sexuality” (Youdell Reference Youdell2005, 250). Despite the importance of this literature in informing my approach, my interest has not been in the production of differentiated workers for the economy or the reproduction of inequitable relations, but rather in the production of differentiated citizenship through everyday practices, rituals and narratives in schools. I therefore build on this tradition, but structure my exploration through an operationalization of the concept of citizenship in order to highlight different dimensions and implications of schooling.

Scholars such as Michael Apple, Lois Weis, Peter Woods and Geoff Whittey have provided important insights that go beyond the more rigid models of cultural reproduction of earlier studies. They emphasize that reproduction is contested and not always successful (Apple Reference Apple1982, Apple and Weis Reference Apple, Weis, Apple and Weis1983) and that more attention should be paid to the form and organization of knowledge and pedagogy, to methods of evaluation and the principles that underpin them, and to how all of this is actually experienced by students and teachers (Apple Reference Apple1982). Ethnographic programs of analysis were therefore seen as more appropriate in aiding the understanding of what schools actually do (Foley, Levinson and Hurtig Reference Foley, Levinson and Hurtig2000, Sewell and Hauser Reference Sewell, Hauser and Kerckhoff1980, Weis Reference Weis, Altbach, Arnove and Kelly1982). In this view, analysis of schools has to be more speculative and less determined, where schools are conceived as part of a contested terrain where day-to-day struggles take place at various levels. Any state aim imprinted onto education may act as a constraint, desire or structural pressure upon the school, but it by no means determines the actual schooling experience or its impact on students. The school can thus “serve as a site for the production of alternative and/or oppositional cultural practices which do not serve (at least not in any straightforward manner) the accumulation, legitimation, or production needs of the state or capital” (Apple and Weis Reference Apple and Weis1986, 11).

Agency is therefore an important point of divergence in these debates. It has been argued that Bourdieu, like other early scholars in the sociology of education, “afforded children little social agency and portrayed them as primarily passive in the face of the inculcation they receive” (Reed-Danahay Reference Reed-Danahay2005, 63–6). On the other hand, notions of subjectivity typically place greater emphasis on indeterminacy, contingency and multiplicity and allow for individual agency in drawing on the multiple discursive resources that are available to actors in different situations (Ortner Reference Ortner2005, Blackman et al. Reference Blackman, Cromby, Hook, Papadopoulos and Walkerdine2008).Footnote ⁸ Subjectivation, as opposed to reproduction or socialization, entails more open possibilities. The focus on fluidity and indeterminacy can shift attention, however, from structural inequalities that are critical for understanding schooling processes and their impact on students. The point is therefore not “to deny the existence of hegemonic processes in schools but, rather, to problematize their assumed coherence and point to their inherent ambiguity” (Reed-Danahay and Anderson-Levitt Reference Reed-Danahay and Anderson-Levitt1991, 546).

The approach I take aims to balance the focus on social stratification and state purposes with an appreciation of fluidity and agency. Approaching subjectivation, difference and agency together, qualitatively and comparatively, allows for appreciating differentiation and contestation, and is critical for understanding schooling as a variable and fluid process. Despite my interest in state purposes and official narratives, I make no assumption that the state or the ruling regime is a monolith or coherent actor. The state is a space of forces characterized by struggle over the very perimeters, prerogatives and priorities of public authority (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieru1994 [1993]). My research emphasizes the ways in which, at various junctures, from textbook authorship committees to nationalist school rituals, official purposes become rearticulated, transformed, diluted, contested, overturned or ignored.

Finally, whereas textbooks are not usually analyzed in ethnographies of schooling, my analysis of textbook discourses brings official narratives on nationalism, belonging and citizenship into conversation with everyday school relations. Studying text and context together provides insights into both state aims and the ways in which they are translated, received and contested in everyday relations. It is critical to addressing questions about the production of lived and imagined citizenship explored across this study.

Outline of the Book

The rest of the book is divided into seven chapters and a conclusion that develops the key overarching arguments. Chapter 1 outlines the political and economic context of the late Mubarak era and provides essential background on the education sector, the evolution of nationalist and ideological narratives in textbooks and the securitization and Islamization of education. It describes the key attributes of the research sites and respondents, the methodological issues involved in conducting the research in schools and the selection of textbooks. The next three chapters inquire into the transformation of the school as a space of lived citizenship. Chapter 2 dissects the trajectories, functioning and implications of informal privatization in the different tiers of schooling. Chapter 3 investigates the classed and gendered dynamics of school punishment, the ways in which teachers explain and situate their practices, how students receive and contest them, and the questions they raise around violence, masculinity and poverty. The analysis of permissiveness and repression is expanded in Chapter 4 in the treatment of noncompliance, disciplinary supervision and gendered contestation.

Chapters 5 and 6 are concerned with the production of imagined citizenship as articulated and enacted in textbooks, school rituals and student discourses. Chapter 5 maps how official textbooks define national belonging, construct good citizenship, articulate national decline and renaissance, and deploy Islam in citizenship and nationalist narratives. Chapter 6 asks how the nation is performed in schools and what notions of citizenship are expressed by young people. It analyzes student, teacher and classroom discourses that relate to feelings of national belonging and constructions of citizenship, tracing the place of Islam and neoliberal citizenship in these discourses. Chapter 7 explains the critical changes in the project of “schooling the nation” since the 2011 uprising, outlining the most relevant developments and their implications for the education sector. It tracks the changing narratives and practices relating to informal privatization, violent punishment, noncompliance, contestation and belonging, and analyzes the critical changes in textbook constructions of nationhood and citizenship. The Conclusion chapter develops the key overarching arguments that emerge from the analysis and its links to the 2011 uprising, elaborating the central notion of permissive-repressive governance, its implications for schools as disciplinary institutions, its connections to neoliberalism as a global phenomenon and its impact on everyday legitimation in schools.