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

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.