International Schools and the Production of Elite Non-Belonging in Cairo’s Sattelite Cities

Roushdy, Noha (2023). International Schools and the Production of Elite Non-Belonging in Cairo’s Sattelite Cities. Revue Egypte, Soudan, Monde Arabe (ESMA)(24), pp. 127-152.

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In Egypt, the proliferation of for-profit international schools has been linked to the formation of a new globalizing elite culture in Cairo’s satellite cities. During two years of ethnographic research in and around international schools in Cairo, many international school teachers and parents described the life of the privileged youth educated in these schools as a “bubble” or used the designation “compound kids” as a shorthand for the unique spatiality that tied them to the gated communities of Cairo’s satellite cities. Few of the youth I met who were educated in international schools contested their characterization. Many openly accepted their likeness to “strangers” or presented themselves as “not very Egyptians,” “like foreigners,” “a minority” and many other variations of ways of expressing an ambivalent sense of national belonging. Drawing on the personal narratives of internationally educated youth, their parents and teachers as well in-depth participant observation research inside an international school in New Cairo between 2016-2017, I examine the urban and educational practices that purportedly produced this ambivalent sense of belonging among this elite youth group. Building on scholarship on neoliberal urbanization, I argue that international schooling contributes to the social construction of satellite city life as a “bubble” or “non-place” (Augé 1995) that is both physically and symbolically separated from a “real Egypt” located beyond the built and natural borders of satellite cities. I suggest that the idiom of the “bubble” not only fails to recognize the embeddedness of “satellite city life” within the local context of Egypt, it also helps validate and reproduce class closure and elite segregation in satellite cities.

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