Daniele Cantini (editor) - Bounded Knowledge: Doctoral Studies in Egypt

Bounded Knowledge

Doctoral Studies in Egypt

Edited by Daniele Cantini

The American University in Cairo Press Cairo New York

This electronic edition published in 2021 by

The American University in Cairo Press

113 Sharia Kasr el Aini, Cairo, Egypt

One Rockefeller Plaza, 10th Floor, New York, NY 10020

www.aucpress.com

Copyright 2021 by The American University in Cairo Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

ISBN 978 977 416 986 1

eISBN 978 1 64903 045 0

Version 1

Daniele Cantini

Daniele Cantini

Nefissa Dessouqi

Ola Kubbara

Ahmed Mansour

Nefissa Dessouqi

David Mills

Jonathan Kriener

Hala Kamal

Mona Abaza

Mona Abaza is a professor of sociology in the Department of Sociology, Egyptology and Anthropology at the American University in Cairo. Abaza received her BA in political science from the American University in Cairo, Egypt (1982), her MA in sociology from the University of Durham, UK (1986), and her PhD from the University of Bielefeld (1990). From 2009 to 2011, she was professor of Islamology at Lund University, and in spring 2014, she worked as a research fellow at Morphomata, Cologne. Previously, she was a visiting scholar at the Institute for South East Asian Studies, Singapore (199092), Kuala Lumpur (199596), lcole des Hautes tudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris (1994), Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg, Berlin (199697), the International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden (20022003), the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Wassenaar (20062007), and the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center (2005). She is the author, among other books, of Debates on Islam and Knowledge in Malaysia and Egypt, Shifting Worlds (London, 1995), The Changing Consumer Culture of Modern Egypt, Cairos Urban Reshaping (Leiden and Cairo, 2006), and The Cotton Plantation Remembered: An Egyptian Family Story (Cairo, 2013).

Daniele Cantini is a researcher at the Martin-Luther-University of Halle/Wittenberg, Germany. He earned his PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Modena and Milano-Bicocca, Italy, in 2006, with an ethnography of the Jordanian university system and its students, studied between 2003 and 2005. Between 2007 and 2010, Cantini was affiliate researcher at the CEDEJ in Cairo, Egypt. In 2010, he was a researcher in the Social Science Research Council, USA, project on Arab Universities: Autonomy and Governance. Between 2011 and 2016 he was postdoc and then senior research fellow at the Research Cluster Society and Culture in Motion at the Martin-Luther-University of Halle/Wittenberg, Germany. In 2016/17, he was research associate at the Orient-Institut Beirut, and subsequently at the Asien-Orient-Institut at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. He taught at the Universities of Milano-Bicocca, Modena, and at the MLU Halle different courses on the Anthropology of the Middle East, on Social and Political Anthropology, and on Ethnology of the Mediterranean. He is the author of Youth and Education in the Middle East: Shaping Identity and Politics in Jordan (London, 2016).

Nefissa Dessouqi holds an MA in Sociology from Cairo University and is currently a researcher in Alternative development studies, training and documentation, as well as a freelance journalist. At the time of the project, she was a doctoral candidate at the Faculty of Arts, Cairo University, Egypt. In over twenty years of working as a researcher, she participated in several projects and collaborated with many renowned research institutes in Cairo, such as the National Centre for Sociological and Criminological Research, al-Meshkat Centre for Research and Training, the Social Research Centre at AUC, the Freedom of Thought and Expression Institute, the CEDEJ (Centre dtudes et de Documentation conomiques, Juridiques et Sociales), Al-Mahrousa Centre for Publishing and Press Services (among others), and elsewhere, such as the Egypt-Swiss Development Fund and the Social Science Research Council.

Hala Kamal holds a PhD and is an Associate Professor of Gender Studies at the Department of English, Faculty of Arts, Cairo University, Egypt, and cofounder of the Women and Memory Foruman Egyptian NGO concerned with the study of women in cultural history. She studied at Cairo University, Egypt, the University of Leeds, UK, and Smith College, USA. She teaches undergraduate and postgraduate courses in Womens Writing, Autobiography and Fiction, as well as Translation Studies. Her research interests and publications, in both Arabic and English, are in the areas of feminist literary criticism, autobiography studies, women and gender studies, and the history of the Egyptian feminist movement. She has been engaged in several Egyptian civil society feminist activism and gender education programs. She has also translated several books on feminism and gender into Arabic, and is currently coediting, with Luise von Flotow, the forthcoming Routledge Handbook of Translation, Feminism and Gender.

Jonathan Kriener graduated with a doctoral degree in Oriental Studies from Ruhr University, Bochum, Germany. In his thesis, he explored secular and religious conceptions of state and society taught at Lebanese schools. From 2002 to 2018, Kriener worked as a research fellow specialized in the field of education at different institutes in Germany, among which are the Georg Eckert Institute, Braunschweig, the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut in Essen, the Center for Near and Middle East Studies, Marburg, the Orient-Institut Beirut, and at the universities of Bochum and Tbingen. Since 2019, Jonathan has worked as an independent researcher and counselor with people suffering from substance abuse, eating disorders, and family dysfunction. Jonathan taught courses on the twentieth-century histories of Lebanon, Israel, and Palestine, as well as on recent Arab educational thought and reform. His publications deal comparatively with history, civics, and religious instruction at Lebanese, Palestinian, and Israeli schools and higher education in Egypt and Lebanon. Jonathan led the research project Local, Regional and International Borrowing and Lending in Social Sciences and Humanities Department at Egyptian and Lebanese Universities funded by the Volkswagen Foundation and conducted at Ruhr University in cooperation with the OIB.

Ola Kubbara obtained her PhD in 2019 at the Faculty of Economics and Political Science (FEPS) from Cairo University, Egypt. Her research interests focus on democratization processes and democracy promotion, educational development, and scientific management. She is the recipient of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) Scholarship of 2017 and is currently conducting scientific research on democracy development in Egypt at Cairo University. Graduate of the German School in Cairo, she finished her Bachelors and Masters degree in political science at the American University in Cairo (AUC). Her work appeared in Open Democracy, the Bundeszentrale for politische Bildung (bpb), Dossier Interstaatliche Konflikte in German, and in the Idafat Journal