An ethnographic account of the rise of international schooling in Egypt.

Learning to Be Egyptian examines how the rise of international schooling in Egypt has recentered longstanding anxieties about the cultivation of national belonging in elite education. Building on twenty months of fieldwork conducted in and around Cairo's international schools between 2016 and 2022, the book follows parents, teachers, and students as they navigate a tension between the cosmopolitan appeal of international education, on the one hand, and cultural expectations of national socialization, on the other. In doing so, Noha Roushdy's fine-grained ethnographic account challenges the dominant association of international education with a cosmopolitan flexibility toward national and ethnic boundaries. By tracing the individual and collective work that goes into the making of a globalizing yet local elite, Learning to Be Egyptian instead shows how international schools can become incubators for the reproduction of decidedly rigid conceptions of class, gender, and national belonging.