Labours of hope: cultures of precarity among Egypt's im/mobile middle class

世界各地的当代劳动力市场使人们越来越难获得有保障和稳定的工作。这阻碍了数以百万计的年轻人获得标志着成功过渡到成年的象征性标志：稳定的工作、稳定的关系或婚姻以及房子。相反，许多人正被推入长期的早产期。我的研究对如何理解和最好地解决这种情况做出了重要贡献。它聚焦于埃及年轻的受过教育的失业人口，这是上世纪80年代大规模经济改革减少政府招聘后出现的，但未能用劳动密集型私营部门的增长取而代之。一些学者断言，正是由于这些人缺乏希望，导致许多人在2011年初前往解放广场要求该国独裁者胡斯尼·穆巴拉克(Hosni Mubarak)下台。但我的项目将注意力从街道和广场转移到更平凡的应对策略上，因为年轻人努力寻找体面的工作。它发现，他们通过坚持努力工作会带来成功的精英理念来应对长期的失业/就业不足，这一理念通过软技能培训课程、招聘会和开罗高档“全球城市”的创业活动向他们兜售。我认为，这些机构和这种任人唯贤的理念非但没有带来实质性的帮助，反而造成了伤害，因为它们在经济持续停滞的情况下导致了自责，并将重点放在导致早熟的更具结构性的原因上：例如缺乏合适的工作、糟糕的公共教育和社会经济不平等。我现在正在发表学术干预、媒体文章和政策论文，并向不同的用户展示我的研究，目的是批评精英主义理想在不同背景下的主导地位，并呼吁对青年失业的政策干预专注于解决结构性原因，而不是将他们的困境归咎于懒惰的个人，我认为，这只会导致2011年埃及表达的那种愤怒。此外，在ESRC联谊会期间，我跟踪了那些设法移民到海湾地区，特别是迪拜的参与者，以考察他们巨大的空间流动性如何影响他们追求自己的抱负。移民往往是一个充满希望的项目，代表着实现不同生活的前景。然而，海湾地区为移民提供了出了名的艰难环境：孤独、歧视和不安全的就业条件。我正在研究埃及移民如何在岌岌可危的移民条件下保持希望和情感福祉，主要目的是让学术界和非学术界的受众都参与进来，呼吁更好地了解海湾移民不稳定的生活，并提出通过政策干预改善他们物质条件的方法。

Contemporary labour markets around the world are making it more and more difficult for people to obtain secure and stable employment. This is preventing millions of youth from obtaining the symbolic markers which designate a successful transition to adulthood: a stable job, a secure relationship or marriage, and a house. Many are instead being pushed into prolonged precarity. My research makes an important contribution to how this condition is understood and best tackled. It focuses on a young educated unemployed population in Egypt, which has arisen in the aftermath of large-scale economic changes in the 1980s that reduced government recruitment, but failed to replace it with labour-intensive private sector growth.Some scholars asserted that it was a lack of hope among this population that directed many towards Tahrir Square in early 2011 to demand the fall of the country's dictator, Hosni Mubarak. But my project shifts attention away from streets and squares, to focus on the more mundane coping strategies adopted as youth struggle locate respectable work. It finds that they cope with prolonged un/underemployment through holding on to the meritocratic idea that hard work will bring them success, which is sold to them by soft-skills training programmes, careers fairs, and entrepreneurship events in Cairo's upscale 'global city.' Rather than materially helping, I argue that these institutions, and this meritocratic idea, do harm as they lead to self-blame in the face of continued stagnation, and keep focus away from more structural causes of precarity: such as a lack of suitable jobs, poor public education, and socio-economic inequalities. I now am publishing academic interventions, media articles, and policy papers, and presenting my research to diverse users, with the aim of criticising the dominance of meritocratic ideals in different contexts, and calling on policy interventions for youth unemployment to focus on tackling structural causes instead of blaming lazy individuals for their plight, which, I argue, only leads to the kind of anger expressed in Egypt in 2011. Furthermore, during the ESRC Fellowship I am following participants who have managed to migrate to the Gulf, specifically Dubai, in order to examine how their drastic spatial mobility influences their pursuit of their aspirations. Migration is often a hopeful project, representing the prospect of achieving a different life. However, the Gulf provides a notoriously difficult environment for migrants: loneliness, discrimination, and insecure employment conditions. I am examining how Egyptian migrants sustain hope and emotional wellbeing within precarious migrant conditions, with the main aim of engaging both academic and non-academic audiences and calling for better understanding of the precarious lives of Gulf migrants, as well as suggesting ways their material conditions might be improved through policy interventions.