The Changing Middle East Reviews

The global economy is increasingly dominated by the production of knowledge goods and by struggles for control over information. This book provides an overview of the challenges and opportunities facing efforts to promote access to knowledge in Egypt. The essays, written by leaders in the field, favor a deeper understanding of how the production of information, innovation, culture, and knowledge affects the core of human development and human rights. Combining both theoretical and empirical approaches, the work will be of interest to scholars and practitioners dealing with intellectual property and innovation the world over. Contributors: Ahmed Abdel Latif, Hossam Bahgat, Jack Balkin, Sherif El-Kassas, Sherif Kamel, Nagla Rizk, Lea Shaver, Rebecca Wright.

For 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.