Episode 9 – Fieldwork: Conducting ethnography in the upper classes

From classrooms to private sports clubs and shopping malls, Egyptian anthropologist Noha Roushdy conducted ethnography in a relatively poorly studied space: that of the upper classes. She questions the tension between national belonging and cosmopolitism in the Egyptian upper classes through an ethnography of for-profit international private schools. With her, host Malek Lakhal discusses how entering the space of the upper means moving to the suburbs, why one needs sometimes to make them think you are a foreigner and the decolonial aspect of knowing that the people you interview are able to read your research once it is published. Noha Roushdy is currently pursuing her post-doc at the Centre d'études et de documentation économiques, juridiques et sociales in Cairo.