Dr. Hania Sobhy

+49 (551) 4956 - 137

sobhy@mmg.mpg.de

Curriculum Vitae

Hania Sobhy is a research fellow at MPI-MMG since 2017. Her research has centered on education, citizenship and contestation, with special reference to the Middle East. Her current project is a comparative study of education and citizenship 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 forthcoming book, Schooling the Nation (Cambridge University Press), 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 ‘The Lived Social Contract’ advances a framework for studying everyday governance and legitimation through education. 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.

Research projects

Selected Publications

2023 (March). Schooling the Nation: Education and Everyday Politics in Egypt. Cambridge University Press. [Print and Open Access].

2023. Reforms for Another Planet: The Global Learning Crisis, Political Drivers and Expert Views on Egypt’s Edu 2.0. RISE working Paper. https://doi.org/10.35489/BSG-RISE-2023/PE06.

2021. The Lived Social Contract in Schools: From protection to the production of hegemony. World Development, 137, 104986. [Open Access]

2020. Violence, Class and Masculinity in Egypt: Gendered Punishment in Cairene Schools. MMG Working Paper 20-03.

2019. Expensive Classrooms, Poor Learning: The Imperatives of Reforming School Construction in Egypt. Alternative Policy Solutions, American University in Cairo.

2017. Recent Policy Directions in Egyptian Education: Privatization, Curriculum Reform and Teacher Salaries. Civil Society and Public Policy Formation Strategies from Morocco and Egypt, Arab Reform Initiative. Pp: 34-43.

2015. Secular Façade, Neoliberal Islamisation: Textbook Nationalism from Mubarak to Sisi. Nations & Nationalism 21(4): 805-24.

2012. The De-Facto Privatization of Secondary Education in Egypt. Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 42 (1): 47-67.

2009 [2011]. Amr Khaled and Young Muslim Elites: Islamism and the Consolidation of Mainstream Muslim Piety in Egypt. In Cairo Contested: Governance, Urban Space and Global Modernity, edited by Diane Singerman. Pp. 415- 454. Cairo: American University Press.

In Arabic

2021. Priorities of Educational Investment between Digital Learning and School Infrastructure. Al-Malaf Al-Masry, 79: 5-9.

2019. Old and New Education in Egypt: Pre-University Education Policies and their Impact on Social Justice. In Public Policies and Social Justice in Egypt. Beirut: Arab Forum for Alternatives.

2016. Educational crises and the evolving social contract with the middle classes. Majalat al-Dimuqratiyya. 1 October.

Public Outreach

From 2015 to the present (in Arabic): Various opinion pieces on education reform, privatization, discipline, teachers, technology, extremism and the middle classes in the Egyptian Al-Shorouk Newspaper.

2015. After Paris, What Role for Reforming Education in the Middle East? OpenDemocracy. 16 December.

2015. To Get Rid of Extremism in Egyptian Education, Understand its Roots. Al-Fanar Media. 6 November.

2015. Mafish Ta‘lim: Why Egypt Ranked Last on Education. The Orient Institute Blog from Cairo and Beirut. 28 May.

2015. A Collapse of Formal Schooling in Egypt. Inequality, Education and Social Power: Transregional Perspectives FTS & MWS. 15 January.