Fall 2026, CairoWorkshop
The Value of Work: Professions, Labour, and Social Recognition
Teaching as a Case
Course details
- Cycle
- Fall 2026, Cairo
- Starts
- Thursday, Oct 1
- Meets
- Thursday, 17:00–21:00Saturday, 17:00–21:00
- Length
- 4 sessions
- Format
- In person
- Taught in
- Arabic / English
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About the course
What makes some forms of work more valued than others? How do societies determine the social and economic value of labour, and what happens when social recognition does not translate into material reward?
This four-day workshop explores the relationship between labour, professional status, social value, and material conditions through a critical sociological lens. We will examine how professions are constructed, valued, regulated, and stratified, and how education, class, gender, institutions, and labour markets shape who is recognized as a professional and what their work is considered worth.
Teaching provides a central case through which to explore these questions. Teaching is widely understood as socially essential work, requiring specialized knowledge, qualifications, professional responsibility, and significant emotional and intellectual labour. Yet in many contexts, teachers experience low wages, precarious employment, limited institutional investment, and fragmented opportunities for professional development. This creates a tension between the social value attached to teaching and the material conditions under which teaching labour is performed. The workshop also asks how those who occupy the profession respond to this tension: how do they adapt, negotiate, reproduce, or challenge the conditions of their work and the value assigned to it?
Using teaching as a window rather than the sole subject of study, we will explore questions of professionalism, labour markets, recruitment, professional training, class, gender, inequality, and collective action, while examining how workers experience and respond to the conditions of their work.
The workshop follows a Critical Participatory Research (CPR) approach, treating participants not simply as learners or recipients of established knowledge, but as co-producers of knowledge. Across the four days, we will combine short academic readings with discussion, collaborative activities, participants’ own experiences and observations, and collective analysis. Each day will produce a shared conceptual or analytical output that builds toward the next question.
The aim is therefore not to arrive with a fixed answer, but to question, examine, and build our understanding together: What is work worth? What makes work a profession? What happens when value and reward diverge? And how do workers respond?
The workshop draws primarily on the Egyptian context, while connecting these questions to broader debates about professions, work, inequality, and the political economy of labour.
Across the four days: (1) What Is Work Worth? — from labour to value; (2) When Does Work Become a Profession? — from value to professionalism; (3) When Value and Reward Diverge — from professionalism to inequality; (4) Who Gets to Define the Value of Work? — from inequality to contestation. Throughout, teaching is a recurring case, not the subject of every session.
At the end of the workshop, participants will have the opportunity—entirely voluntarily—to continue working collectively on the ideas and materials developed during the four days and develop them into a co-authored paper or article for potential publication.
No prior specialization in education or teaching is required. The workshop is intended for anyone interested in questions of work, professions, inequality, social value, and labour from a social science and liberal arts perspective.
Who teaches it
Course flow
The flow may change as the course goes.
October 2026
Central question: How do we decide the value of work? The day moves from labour to value: opening and positionality (who are we and what kinds of work have shaped our lives?); the Value Ranking exercise, where participants rank occupations by social importance, economic reward, skill, status and responsibility; small groups compare rankings and ask what made one occupation “more valuable”; a reading intervention on labour and value; groups identify the dimensions of value — economic, social, symbolic, political; the Value of a Job exercise maps what a worker in one occupation actually produces, economically, socially, culturally and emotionally. Output: the Value Map — a collectively developed working definition of the value of work.
- Capital, Vol. IKarl Marx
- The Invisible HeartNancy Folbre
- The Managed HeartArlie Hochschild
- Bullshit JobsDavid Graeber
- «القيمة الاجتماعية للعمل»مسعودة حمايدي وسميرة خيذر
- «قيم العمل من منظور اجتماعي»نصيرة طاهيري
- «قيم العمل بين الخطاب الأخلاقي والممارسات الاجتماعية»حسام الدين فياض
Central question: What makes an occupation a profession — and who gets to decide? The day moves from value to professionalism: revisiting the Value Map; the Professionalization Test, where groups receive different occupations and decide whether each is a profession; groups develop their own criteria — expertise, credentials, autonomy, status, income, regulation, ethics; a short reading intervention on professionalization, professional closure, credentials, expertise and status; groups examine teaching against the criteria they developed; the contradictions of the profession — low pay, limited autonomy, precarious contracts, fragmented training, recruitment practices. Output: the Professionalism Framework — a collectively developed answer to what makes an occupation a profession and what conditions strengthen or weaken professional status.
- “The Forms of Capital”Pierre Bourdieu
- The System of ProfessionsAndrew Abbott
- “The Rise of Professions and Professional Organizations in Modern Egypt”Donald Reid
- «تقدير كل من المكانة الاجتماعية والاقتصادية للمهن لدى عينة من أفراد المجتمع المصري»عبد اللطيف محمد خليفة
Central question: What happens when socially valued work is economically undervalued? The day moves from professionalism to inequality, from the symbolic and social value of work to the material distribution of rewards: groups map what counts as reward — income, status, security, autonomy, recognition, career progression, training, working conditions; occupations and cases are compared by social value versus material reward; a reading intervention on labour inequality, social reproduction and occupational stratification; evidence-based group analysis of teaching in Egypt — salaries, recruitment, employment security, training, public and private education, TVET, Al-Azhar, gender and spatial inequalities; the Value–Reward Matrix asks why the low-reward, high-social-value quadrant exists. Output: the Value–Reward–Inequality Map.
- The Forms of CapitalPierre Bourdieu
- “Contradictions of Capital and Care”Nancy Fraser
- «إعادة الإنتاج الاجتماعي»فيروز يوسفي
- «فجوة الأجور بين الجنسين في مصر»
Central question: How do workers respond when their labour is undervalued? The day moves from inequality to contestation: mapping possible individual responses — leaving, second jobs, private work, retraining, migration, reducing effort; mapping collective possibilities — professional associations, unions, petitions, strikes, protests, campaigns, informal networks; a short intervention on collective action, political opportunity, professional organization and power; participants examine moments of teacher organization and mobilization in Egypt (pre-2011, post-2011, post-2014) and ask why the forms and spaces of collective action changed. Output: the Contestation Map — and, entirely voluntarily, participants may continue developing the four outputs into a co-authored paper or article for potential publication.
- Power in MovementSidney Tarrow
- Social Movements, 1768–2004Charles Tilly
- The Struggle for Worker Rights in EgyptJoel Beinin (Arabic edition)
- Workers on the NileJoel Beinin & Zachary Lockman (Arabic edition)
- Work on Egyptian social movements and protestMaha Abdelrahman
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