This cross-disciplinary, ethnographic, contextualized, and empirical volume explores the meaning and significance of urban space, and maps the spatial inscription of power on the mega-city of Cairo. Suspicious of collective life and averse to power-sharing, Egyptian governance structures weaken but do not stop the public’s role in the remaking of their city. What happens to a city where neo-liberalism has scaled back public services and encouraged the privatization of public goods, while the vast majority cannot afford the effects of such policies? Who wins and loses in the “march to the modern and the global” as the government transforms urban spaces and markets in the name of growth, security, tourism, and modernity? How do Cairenes struggle with an ambiguous and vulnerable legal and bureaucratic environment when legality is a privilege affordable only to the few or the connected? This companion volume to Cairo Cosmopolitan (2006) further develops the central insights of the Cairo School of Urban Studies. Contributors: Khaled Adham, Jennifer Bell, Agnès Deboulet, Taline Djerdjerian, W.J. Dorman, Bénédicte Florin, Jörg Gertel, Katarzyna Grabska, Patrick Haenni, Kareem Ibrahim, Samia Mehrez, Sarah Ben Néfissa, Agnieszka Paczynska, Samuli Schielke, Mulki Al-Sharmani, Diane Singerman, Hania Sobhy, Malika Zeghal.
Cairo Contested
Governance, Urban Space, and Global Modernity
Edited by
Diane Singerman
536 pp.
15X23cm
ISBN 9789774162886
For sale worldwide
24.95
Also available by this author
Cairo Contested
Governance, Urban Space, and Global Modernity
Edited by Diane SingermanThis cross-disciplinary, ethnographic, contextualized, and empirical volume—with an updated introduction to take account of the dramatic events of early 2011—explores the meaning and significance of urban space, and maps the spatial inscription of power on the mega-city of Cairo. Suspicious of collective life and averse to power-sharing, Egyptian governance structures weaken but do not stop the public’s role in the remaking of their city. What happens to a city where neo-liberalism has scaled back public services and encouraged the privatization of public goods, while the vast majority cannot afford the effects of such policies? Who wins and loses in the “march to the modern and the global” as the government transforms urban spaces and markets in the name of growth, security, tourism, and modernity? How do Cairenes struggle with an ambiguous and vulnerable legal and bureaucratic environment when legality is a privilege affordable only to the few or the connected? This companion volume to Cairo Cosmopolitan further develops the central insights of the Cairo School of Urban Studies.
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Paperback
536 pp.15X23cm
19.95
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Growing Up Cosmopolitan in the Modern Middle East
Mark Allen PetersonFor members of Cairo’s upper classes, cosmopolitanism is a form of social capital, deployed whenever they acquire or consume transnational commodities, or goods that are linked in the popular imagination to other, more ‘modern’ places. In a series of carefully contextualized case studies—of Arabic children’s magazines, Pokémon, private schools and popular films, coffee shops and fast-food restaurants—Mark Allen Peterson describes the social practices that create class identities. He traces these processes from childhood into adulthood, examining how taste and style intersect with a changing educational system and economic liberalization. Peterson reveals how uneasy many cosmopolitan Cairenes are with their new global identities, and describes their efforts to root themselves in the local through religious, nationalist, or linguistic practices.
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Cairo Cosmopolitan
Politics, Culture, and Urban Space in the New Globalized Middle East
Edited by Diane SingermanPaul Amar
Bringing together a distinguished interdisciplinary group of scholars, this volume explores what happens when new forms of privatization meet collectivist pasts, public space is sold off to satisfy investor needs and tourist gazes, and the state plans for Egypt’s future in desert cities while stigmatizing and neglecting Cairo’s popular neighborhoods. These dynamics produce surprising contradictions and juxtapositions that are coming to define today’s Middle East. The original publication of this volume launched the Cairo School of Urban Studies, committed to fusing political-economy and ethnographic methods and sensitive to ambivalence and contingency, to reveal the new contours and patterns of modern power emerging in the urban frame. Contributors: Mona Abaza, Nezar AlSayyad, Paul Amar, Walter Armbrust, Vincent Battesti, Fanny Colonna, Eric Denis, Dalila ElKerdany, Yasser Elsheshtawy, Farha Ghannam, Galila El Kadi, Anouk de Koning, Petra Kuppinger, Anna Madoeuf, Catherine Miller, Nicolas Puig, Said Sadek, Omnia El Shakry, Diane Singerman, Elizabeth A. Smith, Leïla Vignal, Caroline Williams.
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Child Protection Policies in Egypt: A Rights-Based Approach
Cairo Papers Vol. 30, No. 1
Adel AzerSohair Mehanna
Mulki al-Sharmani
Essam Ali
This study seeks to provide a critical analysis of child protection policies in Egypt and examine whether these policies are based on the rights-based model of child protection that is embodied in the Convention for Child Rights (CRC). It identifies the ways in which these policies fail to link child rights and child protection and thus are unable to provide integrated and accessible services that meet children’s needs. Cairo Papers in Social Science 30:1
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176 pp.14X19cm
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Cultural Dynamics in Contemporary Egypt
Cairo Papers Vol. 27, No. 1/2
Edited by Maha AbdelrahmanIman A. Hamdy
Malak S. Rouchdy
Reem Saad
From the politics of food to images in the media, this double issue of Cairo Papers in Social Science focuses on a wide array of emerging cultural patterns in modern-day Egypt and their social, political, and economic ramifications. All the contributions are based on papers delivered at the Cairo Papers Thirteenth Annual Symposium in May 2004, and cover four broad areas: media and language, Islamic marketing, taste and public space, and food and markets. Contributors include Ray Bush (‘Staying Hungry: Food Politics in Egypt and the Near East’), Sami Zubaida (‘Food: Egypt and the Middle East’), Lilia Labidi (‘Truth Claims in the Cartoon World of Nagui Kamel’), Madiha Doss (‘Cultural Dynamics and Linguistic Practice in Contemporary Egypt’), Huda Lutfi (‘Mulid Culture in Cairo: The Case of al-Sayyida A’isha’), Maha Abdelrahman (‘Divine Consumption: Islamic Goods in Egypt’), Iman A. Hamdy (‘Watch for the Devil: Israel in Egyptian Movies and Soap Operas’), Malak S. Rouchdy (‘Food Recipes and the Kitchen Space: The Construction of Social Identities and New Frontiers’), and Reem Saad (‘Transforming the Meaning and Value of Traditional Crafts in Egypt’). Cairo Papers Vol. 27, nos. 1 & 2.
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192 pp.14X21cm
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