Generation in Waiting


Book Description

Young people in the Middle East (15–29 years old) constitute about one-third of the region's population. Growth rates for this age group trail only sub-Saharan Africa. This presents the region with an historic opportunity to build a lasting foundation for prosperity by harnessing the full potential of its young population. Yet young people in the Middle East face severe economic and social exclusion due to substandard education, high unemployment, and poverty. Thus the inclusion of youth is the most critical development challenge facing the Middle East today. A Generation in Waiting portrays the plight of young people, urging greater investment designed to improve the lives of this critical group. It brings together perspectives from the Maghreb to the Levant. Each chapter addresses the complex challenges facing young people in many areas of their lives: access to decent education, opportunities for quality employment, availability of housing and credit, and transitioning to marriage and family formation. This volume presents policy implications and sets an agenda for economic development, creating a more hopeful future for this and future generations in the Middle East. Selected contributors include Ragui Assaad (University of Minnesota), Brahim Boudarbat (University of Montreal), Jad Chaaban (American University in Beirut), Nader Kabbani (Syria Trust for Development), Taher Kanaan (Jordan Center for Public Policy Research and Dialogue), Djavad Salehi-Isfahani (Wolfensohn Center for Development and Virginia Tech), and Edward Sayre (University of Southern Mississippi).




Getting In Is Not Enough


Book Description

This anthology examines women’s paid work in terms of both access to the economic system and the broader agenda of achieving feminist social change worldwide. Generations of feminists have linked women’s empowerment, autonomy, and oppression to issues involving work. Most conflated women’s economic and political clout with gender equity, arguing that increasing women’s access to and leadership in the public workplace is crucial to the success of the feminist project. But recent debates about women's continued inability to gain equality in the workplace raise the need for new approaches to teaching about gender and employment. Getting In Is Not Enough responds to the challenge. Drawn from almost two decades of the Feminist Formations journal, the essays in this book critically examine assumptions about access and the ways in which women affect and are affected by work in three major spheres: economic, social, and political. Getting In Is Not Enough focuses on how access-based feminism, a term developed by Colette Morrow and Terri Ann Fredrick, has both failed and succeeded in achieving equity and justice for women and looks at how transnational feminism has addressed these concerns using a global, fundamentally transformative approach. The contributors consider a wide range of issues, from an examination of the male/female wage gap that starts when girls are teenagers, to policewomen in Persian Gulf countries, to Latinas’ politics, to Aboriginal health care workers, to secretarial work, and to feminist activism in Cuban hip hop.




Educational Roots of Political Crisis in Egypt


Book Description

Egypt is known for its educational influence over other civilizations and countries. As one of the earliest creators of systems of literacy, mathematics, astronomy, engineering, and science, Egyptians led much of the world in acquiring and applying their knowledge throughout their 5,500 years of recorded history. Egyptian education figured prominently in the formation and spread of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim religions. Modern Egypt is the most populous Arab state and has continued to lead the region in education, literature, music, architecture, cinema, radio, and television. There are few middle Eastern political issues--from the War on Terrorism to the Palestinian Israeli conflict--that can be discussed without involving the impact of Egyptian education and its leadership. Contemporary Egypt and its connections to antiquity are not always well understood. Educational Roots of Political Crisis in Egypt explores Egypt's political, economic, social, and cultural leadership from the remarkable civilization of the past to the unique socialistic/capitalistic educational conglomerate of today. Cochran details the outcomes of over thirty years of enormous foreign aid allocated to education, particularly from the World Bank and the United States, in never before documented descriptions. Foreign and Egyptian development of education enables readers familiar with some aspects of politics of the Middle East to make predictions about the future.




The Egyptian Labor Market in an Era of Revolution


Book Description

This book fills an important gap in the knowledge about labor market conditions in Egypt in the aftermath of the Arab Spring uprisings, and it analyzes the results of the latest round of the Egypt Labor Market Panel Survey carried out in early 2012. The chapters cover topics that are essential to understanding the conditions leading to the Egyptian revolution of 25 January 2011, including the persistence of high youth unemployment, labor market segmentation and rigidity, growing informality, and the declining role of the state as an employer. It includes the first research on the impact of the revolution and the ensuing economic crisis on the labor market, including issues such as changes in earnings, increased insecurity of employment, declining female labor force participation, and the stagnation of micro and small enterprise growth. Comparisons are made to labor market conditions prior to the revolution using previous rounds of the survey fielded in 1988, 1998, and 2006. The chapters make use of this unique longitudinal data to provide a fresh analysis of the Egyptian labor market after the Arab Spring, an analysis that was simply not feasible with previously existing data. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the economics of the Middle East and the political economy of the Arab Spring.




زهور في أرض مالحة, اكتئاب النساء في مصر اليوم


Book Description

This study aims to fill a research gap in the phenomenology of Egyptian women's experiences and perceptions of affective suffering and psycho-social distress. Deconstructing disciplinary boundaries, it presents a cross-cultural insight into the interplay among women, culture, and psychological illness, and examines illness triggers, prevalent hierarchies of resort, and common treatment results. Cairo Papers Vol. 28, No. 4.




Political and Social Protest in Egypt


Book Description

Political and Social Protest in Egypt




Schooling the Nation


Book Description

Telling the story of the Egyptian uprising through the lens of education, Hania Sobhy explores the everyday realities of citizens in the years before and after the so-called 'Arab Spring'. With vivid narratives from students and staff from Egyptian schools, Sobhy offers novel insights on the years that led to and followed the unrest of 2011. Drawing a holistic portrait of education in Egypt, she reveals the constellations of violence, neglect and marketization that pervaded schools, and shows how young people negotiated the state and national belonging. By approaching schools as key disciplinary and nation-building institutions, this book outlines the various ways in which citizenship was produced, lived, and imagined during those critical years. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.




The Political Economy of the New Egyptian Republic


Book Description

Egypt is a country of its people. What has been the effect on its inhabitants of the 2011 revolution and subsequent developments? In 2013, a conference held under the auspices of Cairo Papers in Social Science examined this issue from the points of view of anthropologists, historians, political scientists, psychologists, and urban planners. The papers collected here reveal the strategies that various actors employed in this situation. Contributors: Ellis Goldberg, David Sims, Yasmine Ahmed, Deena Abdelmonem, Dina Makram-Ebeid, Clement Henry, Sandrine Gamblin, Hans Christian Korsholm Nielsen, Zeinab Abul-Magd




For Better, For Worse


Book Description

For many Egyptians in the early twentieth century, the biggest national problem was not British domination or the Great Depression but a "marriage crisis" heralded in the press as a devastating rise in the number of middle-class men refraining from marriage. Voicing anxieties over a presumed increase in bachelorhood, Egyptians also used the failings of Egyptian marriage to criticize British rule, unemployment, the disintegration of female seclusion, the influx of women into schools, middle-class materialism, and Islamic laws they deemed incompatible with modernity. For Better, For Worse explores how marriage became the lens through which Egyptians critiqued larger socioeconomic and political concerns. Delving into the vastly different portrayals and practices of marriage in both the press and the Islamic court records, this innovative look at how Egyptians understood marital and civil rights and duties during the early twentieth century offers fresh insights into ongoing debates about nationalism, colonialism, gender, and the family.