CMU's Center for Arts & Society presents an Egyptian Dinner and a Reading: "Between Home and Accommodation: Parallel Lives of Egyptian Workers in Dubai" with Samuli Schielke
Join us for a talk, discussion with Schielke and Shehata, and a delicious meal catered by Ali Baba.
Wednesday, March 12th, 2025 from 5:30-7:00pm
Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, CFA 111
Labor 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?
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.
ASAR Fellow Mukhtar Saad Shehata is a novelist and ethnographer, born in the Egyptian Delta. He graduated from the University of Bahia (UNBE) in Brazil and works as a Research Fellow in the Department of Languages, Cultures, and Applied Linguistics at Carnegie Mellon University. He has published a number of novels, stories, and research books and has written for many magazines and cultural websites. He is currently interested in issues of social change, class, gender resistance, and urbanism in rural Egypt after 2011.