Winter 2023, CairoShort Course
Thinking Privilege in Global Perspective
Course details
- Cycle
- Winter 2023, Cairo
- Length
- 8 weeks
- Format
- Online
- Taught in
- English
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About the course
What is privilege? And how does privilege look like? Is privilege a home address? A body? Or a passport? And how might we make sense of privilege-in context in an increasingly unequal transnational world?
While many trace social inequality to poverty, exclusion, and multiple forms and experiences of economic and social marginalization, in this course we will interrogate the various articulations of privilege that regulate, reproduce, and give meaning to systems of social differentiation and the workings of power in the contemporary world. Participants in this course will get the opportunity to learn about and discuss contemporary social scientific approaches to understanding social class, dominance, and social stratification, and explore how eliteness has been produced, imagined, and contested through scholarship, literature, and film. Through ethnographies, social science and literary texts, we will pay particular attention to the tensions and contradictions of elite belonging in the Global South and examine how configurations of Global South eliteness intersect with issues of coloniality/postcoloniality, race, gender, ethnicity, and national belonging. The aim of the course is to invite students to adopt a multi-scalar approach (local, national, transnational and historical) in thinking about the production/reproduction of privilege, to consider “studying up” a viable approach to understanding the workings of exclusion/inequality and to critically assess their own entanglement of structures/practices that reproduce privilege.
Who teaches it
Noha is a Cairo-based cultural anthropologist with fifteen years of experience conducting qualitative and ethnographic research on issues of gender, social class, and nationalism between academia and civil society. She started her graduate training in anthropology at the American University in Cairo, where she received her MA in 2010, and moved on to earn her doctorate from Boston University in 2021. Noha’s work looks at the reproduction, reconfiguration, and negotiation of colonial cultural hierarchies as class and gender practices in contemporary Egypt. In the past eight years, she has been studying the socialization of elite Egyptian youth in and around Cairo’s international schools. Beyond scholarship, Noha is also an avid reader of literary fiction, a podcast enthusiast, and an amateur artisan-bread baker.
Course flow
Sessions without a date
- Up the Anthropologist: Perspectives Gained from Studying UpNader, Laura. 1972. In Reinventing Anthropology, edited by Dell H. Hymes, 284–311. New York: Pantheon Books.
- The Sociology of ElitesKhan, Shamus Rahman. 2012. Annual Review of Sociology 38: 361–77.
- The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational ClassCurried-Halkett, Elizabeth (2017). Chapters TBA.
- Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s SchoolKhan, Shamus Rahman. 2011. Princetion and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Chapters TBA.
- Money, Morals, and Manners: The Culture of the French and the American Upper-Middle ClassLamont, Michele. 1994. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Chapters TBA.
- Elites or Middle Classes? Lessons from Transnational Research for the Study of Social Stratification in AfricaLentz, Carola. 2015. In Working Papers of the Department of Anthropology and African Studies. Gutenberg Universitaet.
- Barra and Zaman: Reading Egyptian Modernity in Shadi Abdel Salam’s The MummyRakha, Youssef. 2020. Palgrave Macmillan.
- Parenting Empires: Class, Whiteness, and the Moral Economy of Privilege in Latin AmericaRamos-Zayas, Anay Y. 2020. Durham: Duke University Press. Chapters TBA.
- Distinction, Exclusivity and Whiteness: Elite Nigerian Parents and the International Education MarketAyling, Pere. 2019. Springer. Chapters TBA.
- If an Egyptian Cannot Speak EnglishNaga, Noor. 2022. Minneapolis MN: Graywolf Press.
- Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party CircuitMears, Ashley. 2020. Princetion and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Chapters TBA.
- Western Privilege: Work, Intimacy, and Postcolonial Hierarchies in DubaiLe Renard, Amelie. 2021. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Chapters TBA.
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