The event is free but seating is limited; please RSVP here.

Join us for this talk and discussion with Dr. Schielke, and enjoy a delicious meal catered by Ali Baba. This event will be moderated by Artist and Scholar at Risk fellow Mukhtar Shehata.

Labour migration in the Middle Eastern region is a socially conservative project. Most people who leave their homes for work abroad seek to reproduce a conventional, good family life at home, only in greater material comfort. Egyptian migrations in particular have been dominated by an ideal of circular mobility, that is, an expectation that mobility should eventually bring one back home to an accomplished life in stability. However, the idea of migration without a return is gaining new popularity among Egyptians who are drawn to the life and opportunities in migrant metropolises like Dubai, and find it difficult to imagine a normal life in human dignity and decent comfort at home. In this talk, Samuli Schielke combines two stories. The first is the story of a house that a fisherman built in an Egyptian village in the 1950’s, along with the new houses his sons and grandchildren who were raised in that house have built. The second is the story of a life in shared accommodations, ethnically mixed workplaces and streets in a migrant metropolis that invites one to live one’s life and spend one’s money but does not welcome one to stay. The moral contrast of home and accommodation, Schielke suggests, has an unintentional transformative capacity, resulting in rural and small-town lives that are conservative but not traditional, and urban careers that are characterised by the persistent open-ended question: what next?

Co-Sponsors: The Humanities Scholars Program Diane and Bradford Smith Family Fund, The Humanities Center, The Sustainability Initiative, The Center for Black European Studies and the Atlantic, The Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, and the Artists and Scholars at Risk Program.

Bio:

Samuli Schielke is a social and cultural anthropologist writing about contemporary Egypt and the Gulf region. He is a senior research fellow and head of the research unit Lives and Ecologies at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) in Berlin, and author of The Perils of Joy (2012), Egypt in the Future Tense (2015), Migrant Dreams (2020), and Shared Margins (2021, with Mukhtar Shehata). He is currently working on a new book with the working title The Dream of Stability.