Education, Inequality and Social Class in the Middle East and North Africa

Hania Sobhy

This special issue project, co-organized with Dr. Farah Ramzy (University of Strasbourg), examines education as a laboratory for socio-economic change and the structuring of social inequalities across the Middle East and North Africa region. The project addresses various models of schooling and all levels of pre-university education in several countries. It explores topics such as class reconfigurations, social mobility, the reproduction of inequalities, and the impact of neoliberalism on household resources and aspirations.

A first panel is organized in the context of the 2025 Annual Meeting of the Comparative International Edeucation Society (CIES) in Chicago in March 2025. A second workshop is planned for Strasbourg in June 2025, after which a call will be issued for contributions and a special issue proposal developed and submitted.

The project aims to understand the continued impact of neoliberalism, austerity, and the casualization of teacher labor on social inequality and on the choices and attitudes of students, teachers and families. We address intersectionality by examining its intersections of social class and its functioning in schools with gender, ethnic, religious, regional or migration background, and other markers of social difference. We particularly focus on the varying representations of schools and schooling models and compare aspirations with the realities of available resources in fluctuating economic contexts and explore the impact of these differences on experiences, interactions, aspirations and strategies for success and navigation of the school system. The analysis of the variations in parents and student profiles aim to tackle questions of social and cultural capital as factors in access to specific schools, but also as outcomes of having followed one education model or the other. We aim to consider the trajectories of upward and downward social mobility with networks of graduates from different generations, as well as the evolving values of diplomas, representations of schools and the role of education in social distinction.

The study of education systems in the Middle East and North Africa has traditionally focused on themes of nationalism, identity, citizenship, and gender. While existing research has inevitably addressed issues related to social class—exploring its intersections with privatization, informality and everyday violence and national belonging, far more work is needed to foreground social class as a central theme in its own right. The historiography of education in the region has focused on the emergence of national education systems as part of the more complex process of state building, modernization and decolonization. While waves of formal and informal privatization have been analyzed, in-depth explorations of class as a factor and as an outcome in the evolution of national education markets remain lacking. Little research has examined the evolution of schooling models, including their branding, targeted clientele, and narratives concerning comparative advantage. The reflection on education as a locus of reproduction of social inequalities both as symbolic domination in daily interactions and on the long term trajectories of social mobility has been surprisingly limited when it comes to pre-university education in the Middle East and North Africa region. Changes in state involvement or disengagement through formal regulations and informal practices have to be complemented with analysis of the impact of crises on the region, including COVID, financial crises and continuous flows of migration.