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

当今世界各地的劳动力市场使人们越来越难以获得有保障和稳定的就业。这使数百万青年无法获得成功过渡到成年的象征性标志：稳定的工作、稳固的关系或婚姻以及一所房子。相反，许多人正被推入长期的不稳定状态。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。它关注的是埃及受过教育的年轻失业人口，这是在20世纪80年代大规模经济改革后出现的，这些改革减少了政府招聘，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，正是这些人缺乏希望，才导致许多人在2011年初前往解放广场要求该国独裁者下台，胡斯尼·穆巴拉克。但我的项目将注意力从街道和广场转移到了年轻人在寻找体面工作时所采取的更平凡的应对策略上。研究发现，他们通过坚持努力工作会带来成功的精英思想来科普长期失业/就业不足，开罗高档“全球城市”的软技能培训计划，职业博览会和创业活动向他们推销了这一思想。我认为，这些机构和这种精英思想并没有提供实质性的帮助，而是造成了伤害，因为它们在面对持续的停滞时会导致自责，并使人们的注意力远离不稳定的结构性原因：例如缺乏合适的工作，公共教育水平低下以及社会经济不平等。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，目的是批评精英理想在不同背景下的主导地位，并呼吁青年失业的政策干预专注于解决结构性原因，而不是指责懒惰的个人陷入困境，我认为，只会导致2011年埃及所表达的那种愤怒。此外，在ESRC奖学金期间，我跟踪那些设法迁移到海湾地区，特别是迪拜的参与者，以研究他们剧烈的空间流动性如何影响他们对抱负的追求。移徙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一个众所周知的困难环境：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不稳定的移民条件下维持希望和情感健康，主要目的是吸引学术和非学术受众，并呼吁更好地了解海湾移民的不稳定生活，以及建议通过政策干预改善他们的物质条件。

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.