We Take Care of Our Students: Private Universities and the Politics of Care in Egypt

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn this article, I discuss the notion of care in the context of private higher education institutions in Egypt. Care is a complex, ambiguous and polysemic concept, which needs to be understood in terms of its logics and practices. The article opens with a discussion of the ways in which care is portrayed by different actors in the context of the October 6 University, an Egyptian for-profit private university on which I carried out ethnographic research in 2010 and 2012. The Egyptian context is then briefly introduced, using university as an entry point to understand some of the neo-liberal transformations in the past 25 years. The article shows how the notion of care hides as well as reveals dynamics, and relates the findings to recent anthropological literature on the subject. The aim of the article is to critically discuss the relevance of the notion of care in an unusual and highly contested setting.