This paper, focusing on public education in general and school textbooks in particular, analyzes the successive configurations of gendered nation-state identities in Turkey. It is argued here that in the early twentieth century Turkey, state-endorsed production of an imaginary middle-class nuclear family was part and parcel of the making of a modern nation-state. The nation was imagined through an analogy of family. With the nuclear family constituting the micro-cosmos of the nation, public identities were attached to and realized through family identities. In this civilizational project of the Republic, the textbooks focused on the middle class husband-father as the citizen ideal. The middle class wife-mother has been narrated in a dependent, at best, in a helpmate position in relation to the husband. This construct has been modified in the later years such that the class base has been broadened. Women, within time, came to be presented in less dependent roles in the public sphere; however the emphases on the familial identities and family-nation analogy have not ceased to exist, but in fact increased towards the end of the century. Public mass education, besides being a mechanism for socialization and disciplining of populations, has also been used worldwide as an instrument for creating social change and realizing the process of nation-building. It has historically been state-sponsored and regulated. National curricula and textbooks, as the transmitters of selected and organized knowledge, are the result of these state-imposed guidelines. In countries such as Turkey, where state-centric curriculum development, and textbook production or authorization is the practice, textbooks are the major carriers of the state's discourses. They are one of the sources that can be used to analyze the political and social order, as well as the formation of the body-politic and selves. Thus this paper focuses on the analysis of the schoolbooks that have been officially designed and authorized for primary education, which by virtue of being compulsory reflects mass education in Turkey. The research covers the Turkish language, life sciences, and social studies textbooks; it begins with the year 1928 and is carried into the current times.

The economic exclusion of youth under 30 years of age in the Middle East, in general, and Egypt, in particular, has received attention by several scholars in recent years. However, little is known about the beliefs and attitudes of this group of young people that might have contributed to or resulted from their social and economic exclusion. The present paper attempts to analyze survey data based on representative samples of the Egyptian publics 15 years of age and over conducted since 2000-2001. Egypt is at a stage in its demographic transition with a marked "youth bulge," a period in which the proportion of youth in the population is increasing significantly compared to other age groups. It is expected that the present investigation will provide valuable information that might have policy implications for developing strategies to deal with the economic and social exclusions of youth in Egypt and other Arab countries in the Middle East. The present analysis will focus on youth culture or value changes along selected number of indicators that reflect their religious, political, and cultural orientations. The selection of comparable indicators over the ten years period will enable us to understand their value changes vis-a-vie family and faith, gender issues, work ethic, identity formation, politics, attitudes towards the environment, the community, and their future orientations. During the course of the analysis, we will address the following questions: 1. What are the sources of their knowledge of society and the worldo 2. How much do global influences, such as the media and the internet, have on their values and beliefsi 3. What role do authoritative sources, as represented by their parents and religious institutions, have on their values and beliefsi 4. What shapes their views of the socio-political and cultural issues facing their societyi 5. How do they view the direction in which their society is goingo 6. Do they have much hope for the futuret 7. What are the factors that shape their world orientations o 8. How do they view the job situation and their possibilities for entrepreneurships In answering the above questions, we expect that understanding the attitudes of Egyptian youth will shed some light on their priorities in life and give insights on the norms that shape their lives.

My paper presents new findings from a comprehensive socio-anthropological study that seeks to explain the accelerated expansion of higher education in the occupied Palestinian territories since the establishment of the PNA in 1994 and the social consequences of this process. We found the advance in Palestinian tertiary education worthy of research because of its persistence and further progress in the years that past since the outbreak of the second Intifada, an era that witnessed unprecedented intensification of the Israeli military rule in the oPt. Given the steep decline in living conditions, the soaring unemployment and poverty rates, the precariousness and the human suffering that underlined this time period, the marked development in higher education emerged as paradoxical The first phase of our research (which I presented at the 2008 MESA meeting) underscored institutional policies that facilitated the spread of tertiary enrollment and pointed at the changes in the social, demographic and gendered composition of the student population over the past 15 years. Our findings were based on an in depth study of a representative sample of nine institutions of higher education, including three universities, the Open University, four community colleges and one university college. The current research aims at an analysis of the predicament of the tens of thousands of university and college students that graduate each year. Our starting point is the apparent disparity, which clearly emerges from statistical data of recent years, between the continuous growth of tertiary enrollment and the extremely limited capacity to absorb the highly skilled graduates in the public and private sectors. Given the underlying scarcity of employment opportunities, our fieldwork set out to examine the concrete manifestations that this scarcity receives in the work and work-related experiences of graduates, differentiated along gender, geographical region, marital status, institution, specialization, and additional factors. Our research population encompasses a representative sample of graduates of the nine institutions that we studied who graduated between 2000 and 2009. A special questionnaire was designed for the graduates of each institution in attempt to capture the impact of its unique features. The questions address a wide range of topics, including the considerations and motivation that direct the choice of specialization, material and moral support of family during studies, the search after work, the option of migration, the toll of unemployment on self and family and ways of coping, the work experience and its impact on gender relations and family patterns.

This paper analyses the development of historiography in Saudi Arabia since the kingdom's foundation in 1932. My analysis of this process, which has not been comprehensively studied before, is based on intensive fieldwork in the kingdom, including interviews with dozens of Saudi historians. I argue that Saudi historiography has been characterised by three important tendencies, which reveal wider struggles over identity and resources between people close to the government, representatives of local communities, and academics: The first tendency reduces the modern history of the country to one of the Wahhabi movement and Saudi rulers and elevates their achievements. Based on earlier pro-Wahhabi chronicles, it contrasts a dark age of idolatry, heresies and chaos in the Arabian Peninsula before the Wahhabi movement with a blessed age of security, stability, education and unity. Due to the comparatively late establishment of modern formal education in the kingdom, this tendency was first expressed by foreigners close to Saudi kings and particularly supported by King Faisal's government in its conflict with Nasser in the 1960s. Later, it has become the dominant tendency of narration in textbooks and the National Museum. However, with the spread of mass education due to expanding oil production since the 1970s and in reaction to the dissolution of traditional communities with increasing mobility and urbanisation, a second tendency gained strength: local and tribal historiography. Saudis have produced a growing number of books focussing on and elevating their regions, tribes and branches of tribes in history. While some of them emphasise their community's contributions to national unity, others emphasise their region's long struggles against Saudi forces and refute the argument that the pre-Wahhabi history of regions such as 'Asir or Hejaz was one of idolatry and heresy. Finally, a third tendency has appeared with the sending of history students with scholarships abroad and the development of Saudi universities since the 1970s: Academic studies, which neither elevate the Saudi rulers or other groups nor employ religiously biased perspectives and arguments, but explain the appearance of the Wahhabi movement and establishment of the modern Saudi kingdom through an analysis of social and economic factors. Although this tendency remained marginal and received few incentives for further development in the 1980s and 1990s with dropping state revenues, it has gained strength in recent years with the increasing expenditure on universities and the general opening of the country in the 2000s.