Asef Bayat

Linda Herrera

Localities, countries, and regions develop through complex interactions with others. This striking volume highlights global interconnectedness seen through the prism of the Middle East, both “global-in” and “global-out.” It delves into the region’s scientific, artistic, economic, political, religious, and intellectual formations and traces how they have taken shape through a dynamic set of encounters and exchanges. Written in short and accessible essays by prominent experts on the region, Global Middle East covers topics including God, Rumi, food, film, fashion, music, sports, science, and the flow of people, goods, and ideas. The text explores social and political movements from human rights, Salafism, and cosmopolitanism to radicalism and revolutions. Using the insights of global studies, students will glean new perspectives about the region.

Into the Twenty-First Century

Global Middle East

"This is an excellent collection of essays on youth in a number of Muslim majority (and minority) societies in the context of globalization and modernity. A particular strength of this volume is its ability to highlight the multiple and contested roles of religion and personal faith in the fashioning of contemporary youthful Muslim identities. Such insights often challenge secular Western master narratives of modernity and suggest credible reconceptualizations of what it means to be young and modern in a broad swath of the world today." -- Asma Afsaruddin, Professor of Islamic Studies, Indiana University In recent years, there has been a proliferation of interest in youth issues and Muslim youth in particular. Young Muslims have been thrust into the global spotlight in relation to questions about security and extremism, work and migration, and rights and citizenship. This book interrogates the cultures and politics of Muslim youth in the global South and North to understand their trajectories, conditions, and choices. Drawing on wide-ranging research from Indonesia to Iran and Germany to the U.S., it shows that while the majority of young Muslims share many common social, political, and economic challenges, they exhibit remarkably diverse responses to them. Far from being "exceptional," young Muslims often have as much in common with their non-Muslim global generational counterparts as they share among themselves. As they migrate, forge networks, innovate in the arts, master the tools of new media, and assert themselves in the public sphere, Muslim youth have emerged as important cultural and political actors on a world stage.

New Cultural Politics in the Global South and North

Being Young and Muslim

Egypt's January 25 revolution was triggered by a Facebook page and played out both in virtual spaces and the streets. Social media serves as a space of liberation, but it also functions as an arena where competing forces vie over the minds of the young as they battle over ideas as important as the nature of freedom and the place of the rising generation in the political order. This book provides piercing insights into the ongoing struggles between people and power in the digital age.

The Egyptian Popular Insurrection and the Internet

Revolution in the Age of Social Media

The everyday practices, policy ideas, and ideological and political battles that have shaped Egyptian education, from the era of nation-building in the twentieth century to the age of digital disruption in the twenty-first From the 1952 revolution onward, a main purpose of formal education in Egypt was to socialize the population into adopting certain attitudes and behaviors conducive to the regimes in power. Control by the state over education was never entirely hegemonic, however, due to the persistent influence of foreign actors and Islamist movements. Egyptian education came increasingly under pressure due to a combination of the growing privatization of the education sector, which led to a new class of educational entrepreneurs, the growth of political Islam, which triggered a national security upset, and globalization and rapidly changing digital technologies, which transformed cultures and practices of learning both in and out of the classroom. Educating Egypt traces the everyday practices, policy ideas, and ideological and political battles of education from the era of nation-building in the twentieth century to the age of digital disruption in the twenty-first. Its overarching theme is that schooling and education, broadly defined, have consistently mirrored larger political, economic, and cultural notions about what constitutes the good society and the good citizen, even as these notions have been intensely contested. Drawing on three decades of ethnographic research inside Egyptian schools and among Egyptian youth, Linda Herrera asks what happens when education actors harbor fundamentally different views about the purpose of schooling, the role of the citizen, and the character of the collective "we" of society.

Civic Values and Ideological Struggles

Educating Egypt

Wired Citizenship examines the evolving patterns of youth learning and activism in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). In today’s digital age, in which formal schooling often competes with the peer-driven outlets provided by social media, youth all over the globe have forged new models of civic engagement, rewriting the script of what it means to live in a democratic society. As a result, state-society relationships have shifted—never more clearly than in the MENA region, where recent uprisings were spurred by the mobilization of tech-savvy and politicized youth. Combining original research with a thorough exploration of theories of democracy, communications, and critical pedagogy, this edited collection describes how youth are performing citizenship, innovating systems of learning, and re-imagining the practices of activism in the information age. Recent case studies illustrate the context-specific effects of these revolutionary new forms of learning and social engagement in the MENA region.

Youth Learning and Activism in the Middle East

Wired Citizenship

Lefebvre's classic analysis of daily life under capitalism in one complete volume. The three-volume text by Henri Lefebvre is perhaps the richest, most prescient work about modern capitalism to emerge from one of the twentieth century's greatest philosophers and is now available for the first time in one complete volume. Written at the birth of post-war consumerism, Critique was an inspiration for the 1968 student revolution in France. It is a founding text of cultural studies and a major influence on the fields of contemporary philosophy, geography, sociology, architecture, political theory and urbanism. Lefebvre takes as his starting point and guide the 'trivial' details of quotidian experience: an experience colonized by the commodity, shadowed by inauthenticity, yet remaining the only source of resistance and change. This is an enduringly radical text, untimely today only in its intransigence and optimism.

This volume explores the ways in which the young, both in Muslim majority societies and Muslim communities in the West, negotiate their Muslim identity in relation to their youthful desires - their individuality, the search for autonomy and security for the future.

Linda Herrera

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