Description
This research project looked at the configurations of society, legitimacy, knowledge and power in Egypt, from the vantage point of the higher education sector, which Daniele Cantini has been researching since 2007. According to both local and international sources, the educational sector in Egypt has been in deep crisis for decades, and this is usually traced back to an even deeper crisis of citizenship. The main interest of the project was therefore to look at this overarching discourse of crisis, how it is constructed and with which evidence, and which practices does it enable. From a theoretical point of view, the starting point was the focus on the university as a fundamental institution in the contemporary configuration of knowledge and power, in combination with the recent anthropological interest in global assemblages, in this case higher education as a ‘glocal’ technology of governance. The goal of this research was to discuss how significance is made by resorting to the crisis narrative – how different modes of organisation and reforms are introduced and how social actors adapt their evaluations to the changing context. In this sense, the project has a significance that goes beyond Egypt and the higher education sector, since similar processes are at play elsewhere. Ultimately, the project investigated the changes in the conception of what the state is and should be, between social and economic considerations, both locally and internationally oriented, through the lens of the higher education sector.
Key publication
Team members
Daniele Cantini
Senior Research Fellow at the University of Halle
Related
Vaccine Inequity (completed project)
Uli Beisel, Richard RottenburgThis project interrogates how fair access can be built into the design of vaccines and critically...
Water contexts of Freetown (completed project)
Lorenz GoschThis project engages with the social life of water in Freetown, Sierra Leone.
The haunting of colonialism (completed project)
Fazil MoradiThis study examines the future inscribed into the restitution of artworks originating from the Ki...
