Book Review: The Struggle for Citizenship Education in Egypt: (Re)Imagining Subjects and Citizens by Dorio, J. N., Abdou, E. D., & Moheyeldine, N.

Abstract

The Struggle for Citizenship Education in Egypt offers a timely contribution to the literature on education in Egypt and the Global South more widely. Taking Citizenship Education (CE) as its main focus, the book comprises a collection of 15 theoretically and empirically informed chapters that analyze the “narratives, spaces, and forms of citizenship education prior to the January 25th Egyptian Revolution and during its aftermath” (p. 1). In doing so, the book explores how Egyptian youth and educators are “transforming various educational spaces and subverting authoritarian education and rule, connecting education with social and political change” (p. 18). The chapters are wide-ranging covering the rise of activism in Egypt (Chapter 2), social media and civic engagement (Chapter 3), how new forms of citizenship are influenced by Muslim youth volunteering (Chapter 4), how schools’ physical space and everyday disciplinarian discourses reproduce state hegemony as well as contradict it (Chapter 5), the discourses that shape the (under)representation of the Nubian community in school textbooks (Chapter 6), the understandings and enactments of notions of citizenship among students in Cairene schools (Chapter 7), the interpretation and adaptation of global citizenship education within a local international school (Chapter 8), how global citizenship education is taught in an elite Egyptian university (Chapter 9), the dynamics of nonformal spaces of citizenship education within public and private universities (Chapters 10 and 11), the emergence of an “unschooling” movement among middle and upper-middle class Egyptians (Chapter 12), child laborers’ and their families’ understandings of education and citizenship (Chapter 13), coworking spaces and promoting civic engagement (Chapter 14), and nonformal educational initiatives that offer competing understandings of Egyptian history and their links to developing critical consciousness (Chapter 15). The main arguments developed in this collection coalesce around the Uprisings’ influence on the perceptions of citizenship in Egypt; the importance of broadening understandings of citizenship education; and, crucially, the agency of Egyptians to resist “top-down, one-dimensional nationalistic narratives” (p. 3) and to define their own understandings of citizenship. The book’s uniqueness lies in its examination of Book Reviews