
Hania Sobhy
Photo: Max Weber Stiftung
under CC BY 4.0
Hania Sobhy is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Orient-Institut Beirut where she is writing up her research on Pro-Revolution Mobilization in Egyptian Elections 2012-2014. In 2012-2013, she was a postdoctoral Fellow with the EUME program of the Forum Transregionale Studien.
During the conference “Inequality and Education” she presented a paper about “Educational Privatization and the Collapse of State Institutions under Mubarak”. She published recently an article about “Mafish Ta’lim: Why Egypt Ranked Last on Education” on the Mish ma32ool Blog.
What was surprising to you when you were a child? What is it that you always wanted to know about the world?
I think that from a young age I wanted to know why things that seemed so wrong, unjust or counterproductive happened and continued to exist. At the age of 17 I wrote a letter to a famous newspaper columnist with a lengthy critique of what I understood as the policies, conflicts of interest and corruption that created the poor and increasingly marketized condition of education I was experiencing. He actually published portions of my letter over three days in his column. In a sense, I was interested in the incentives and power relations that sustained the status quo. I was also starting to wonder about what it is that creates a will to resist. I wanted to understand why most people took little action to contest these corrupt practices. Is it ‘cultural’ as some might argue? Is it a kind of ‘learned helplessness’ based on repeated experiences of the futility – and often emotional and physical violence – that are associated with such acts of contestation?
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