Taking up the task of providing ethnographic insights on one of the main spaces youth inhabit, the educational sector (Adely 2009), the paper discusses the condition of being a university student in contemporary Jordan. Education is central to understanding what choices and dilemmas youth face today, and I argue that the university provides a unique space in which to investigate changing notions of education, citizenship, social and gender roles, religious and friendship ties. The institution legitimize knowledge and its value, regulates access to different faculties and then to different careers in the labor marker, and provides hierarchies of worth to sustain division within society. Students experience contrasting feelings that push them toward different moral projects – personal realization, familial expectations, pressure from peers and from the dominant culture on campus, religious ideals and career plans. Based on eighteen months of ethnographies research between 2003 and 2012 at the University of Jordan, the oldest institution in the country, the paper offers a unique contextualization of students’ subjectivities within the university as an institution. I focus in particular on students’ modes of socialization, and on how these are induced by the structure of the university, as well as from broader societal distinctions – and increasingly so, thanks to the recent reforms that have fundamentally altered ways of getting into the university. I will concentrate on the differences between the scientific and the humanistic curricula – and the different sets of values attached to both – and how this reflects on differences among the students enrolled in these curricula, differences among the more and the less privileged faculties. The paper finally analyses how Jordanian students wait out their university years, trying to find their ways in a political context that is heavily shaped by a number of crisis in almost all neighboring countries, which have heavy consequences in Jordan. Among students feelings of boredom, and fears of waithood, abound but within a notion of normalcy, of the endurance necessary to successfully wait out this liminal condition.

Over the last two decades, international development work in Egypt has focused on enhancing the status of women and girls through fostering agency and empowering communities. In 2001, Population Council, a large international non-governmental organization, designed and implemented Ishraq (Sunrise), a 20-month second-chance school program for girls in rural Upper Egypt, aiming to transform the lives of girls between the ages of 12-15 through literacy and life-skills training. In examining the legacy of educational intervention in Egypt since the colonial period (1882-1922), this paper draws on Timothy Mitchell’s (1988, 2002) works concerning the mechanisms of social control used by the British colonial administration as they relate to the practice of schooling. This contextual framing is particularly important as Ishraq was implemented against the backdrop of larger national level reform strategies. Through a critical examination of Henry Ayrout’s (1938) work on rural development and Egyptian peasant life during the interwar period, this analysis illustrates how the State and non-state actors historically favored interventions that focus on eradicating behaviors deemed ‘backwards’ or ‘pre-modern’ in rural areas. In addition to this historical analysis, this paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted over a six-month period between 2011-14 to reveal the uneven experiences of Ishraq staff and students are largely sustained through colonial-era schooling practices employed by teachers. Through examining program documents and conducting interviews with program staff and their locally based Egyptian NGO partners, this paper illustrates that Ishraq does not adequately account for the historical, sociocultural, and structural conditions that have come to shape the experiences of girls living in rural Upper Egypt. These historical and textual analyses illustrate how Ishraq’s advocacy for the reform of local “culture” affects the experiences of teachers, students, and program staff in uneven ways. This critical poststructural analysis of the research findings suggests Ishraq furthers the divide that exists between rural and urban communities in Upper Egypt.

Democratizing Academia: New Concepts of Socialization at Tunisia´s Universities This paper discusses the changing role of Tunisian universities that started with the introduction of democracy in 2011. I argue that since the breakdown of authoritarianism the Tunisian state regards institutions of higher education as key actors within the national democratization project. My observations are based on the analysis of policies, laws, newspaper articles from the Tunisian press and interviews conducted in Tunisia. The democratic governments since 2011 have decided for an array of policies that aim at democratizing universities and therefore socializing for democratic university students. The till that date omnipresent university police was taken from the campuses and novelties like democratic elections of academic senates, university councils, deans, directors and university presidents were introduced. Students are now understood as political subjects and politically active citizens. As the national “Strategic Plan for the Reform of Higher Education and Science 2015-2025” illustrates, the state understands universities as multipliers of the democratic idea in the country. As laid down in the strategic plan, universities should better connect with their local communities and through that spread democratic values in society. This view on universities corresponds with the concept of “civically engaged universities” which is a theoretical ideal that has its origin in U.S.-American discussions on the interconnectedness of universities, civil society and democracy. The Tunisian state manages the socialization of its academic youth on an international level as well and increasingly cooperates with universities in other democratic states. Students and academic staff are send abroad not only for enriching their professional expertise, but also to learn about the democratic functioning of student parliaments etc. Furthermore, the Tunisian state has to face that in the new political freedom the cleavage between secularist and Islamist forces has become visible at the universities. As the “Manouba-Affair” made clear, Islamist voices and even Salafist violence have entered the campuses. A certain Islamization of university life also became apparent in November 2015 when for the first time the Islamist student organization UGTE won the elections over the student councils. It remains to be seen how the state will manage the Islamization of its academic youth. However, if Tunisia wants to keep on the democratic track, it will have to give Islam a voice at its universities.

Education is commonly lauded as a guarantor of a social contract in which citizens accept state authority in exchange for conditions for citizens to thrive and achieve social mobility. In the past two decades, the aim of educating for the “knowledge economy” has grown prominent in development discourses and is championed by an array of actors, including national governments, donor agencies, and private philanthropists. Since 2003, Jordan has partnered with organizations to enact educational reforms to realize this vision of progress. These efforts have been accompanied by a series of top-down campaigns in Jordan aimed at fostering national unity and youth participation in public life. These attempts to produce empowered and educated national subjects, along with Jordan’s relatively high rankings on development indices, have contributed to its image of stability and moderation in an oft-volatile region. Yet high rates of youth unemployment and political marginalization in Jordan, along with regional conflicts fueling the displacement of hundreds of thousands of refugees, challenge this image and other assumptions about political authority, socioeconomic mobility, and purpose of education. This paper presents emergent findings from an ongoing longitudinal qualitative study of eight Jordanian university students. Drawing on data from an ethnographic case study of two government high schools for boys in 2007-2008, along with annual interviews conducted with a subset of original and new participants since Summer 2014, this paper endeavors to map how the pursuit of education has become a process fraught with ambivalence amid larger conditions of social uncertainty. Additionally, the paper explores the following questions: How are the aspirations of a livable life mediated through interactions with educational institutions, and what do those interactions tell us about possibilities for youth belonging in these times?