Hania Sobhy  is a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Diversity (MPI-MMG) since 2017. Her current project is a comparative study of education in post-uprising Egypt, Lebanon and Tunisia, and she is co-editing a special issue on ‘Lived Citizenship and Uprising in the Middle East’ with Citizenship Studies. Her first book,  Schooling the Nation  (Cambridge University Press- Open Access), uses education to tell the story of how citizenship was lived, imagined and contested in the years before and after the 2011 Egyptian uprising. Her latest article in World Development on advances a framework for studying ‘ The Lived Social Contract ’ through the four parameters (4Ps) of protection, provision, participation and the production of hegemony. She completed her studies in political science and economics at McGill and SOAS, and was previously based at the IREMAM (Marie Currie COFUND), Freie Universitaet Berlin (EUME Program), the Orient-Institut Beirut and Phillips-University Marburg.

Project description: 

Education, Diversity and Contestation in the Middle East

This research project is a comparative study of education, diversity and contestation in the Middle East following two waves of uprising. Focusing on the cases of Tunisia, Lebanon and Egypt, it examines the transformations in the pre-university education sectors as they relate to citizenship, diversity and contestation. In particular, it inquires into teacher narratives around questions of diversity and inequality in the classroom and their own collective mobilization and strikes in this critical historical period. Most of the fieldwork for this project is planned for 2023.