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theses

This dissertation captures the story of materially embedded political mobilization histories in Egypt. However, the story does not emerge from the revolutionary urban centers, as was the popularly and scholarly mediated experience of the January 25, 2011 Revolution. Studied from the Nile Delta vantage point, this dissertation brings together two villages in two different governorates, al-Beheira and al-Daqahliya, located one-hundred-and-eighty kilometers apart. The villages tell the story of state development, neglect, and community mobility as enacted, mediated, and contested through infrastructure. Infrastructure is a means of not just navigating physical space but is also a way of organizing everyday life, materially—through roads, bridges, irrigation networks, and affectively—through political mobilization, connection-building, and customary rural governance structures. These infrastructural instantiations are embedded in the material histories and built environments of where citizens emerge from. The history of one of the villages of my research, Tahseen, is directly indebted to 1952 independence that brought President Gamal Abdel-Nasser to power, yet the village launched a secession movement from its municipal government in 2012, six decades after its creation. The second village of research, Nebeira, is also shaped by the history of 1952 through the process of the Nasser government’s land reform. In this dissertation I argue how the everyday experience of politics between citizens and the multiple state bodies emerges infrastructurally. Infrastructure is both material and social—it is a site where politics are mediated and a site where people reproduce the social infrastructure that organizes their lives.

ETD_11258

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

ETD doctoral

doi:10.7282/t3-4ff7-bn58

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