Photo: A kiosk in a building site in Badr City, 2024 @ Carl Rommel
Egypt as a Project - Séminaire avec Carl Rommel
Responsables du séminaire : Thomas Pierret et Marine Poirier
Lundi 30 mars 2026, à 10h00, à la Mmsh (Aix-en-Provence), en salle 219, le séminaire de recherche de l'équipe Sciences sociales du contemporain, accueillera Carl Rommel pour une intervention intitulée “Egypt as a Project: Dreamwork and Future-Making in President el-Sisi’s New Republic”.
La séance aura lieu en anglais et uniquement en présentiel.
In this talk, I will present the general conceptual arguments and a handful of ethnographic scenes from a book that I am currently writing. Titled Egypt as a Project, the monograph examines dreams taking the shape of “projects” (mashari‘) in contemporary Egypt. As lower-middle class men devise small, often informal business projects for profit making and social improvement, the military-backed regime undertakes spectacular megaprojects in the desert to showcase its grandeur and national-development ambitions.
Based on 25 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Cairo, media analysis and historical data, the book’s six ethnographic chapters show how politicians and ordinary citizens alike turn to mashari‘ to set material and social improvements in motion, and how this has a series of social, economic, and political effects. Moving across spheres and scales, its ethnographic documentations of Egyptian project-making will offer unique bottom-up perspectives both on Cairo’s informal economies and on the desert developments that President el-Sisi calls The New Republic (al-gumhuriyya al-gadida).
Centering an analytic which I call “project dreamwork,” the book foregrounds a template for future-making that is ubiquitous across late-capitalist societies but has often been treated as background. Its stories and arguments thus resonate well beyond the immediate Egyptian context. Ultimately, the book sets out to inaugurate an anthropology of the project form. It injects projects and project making at the center of interdisciplinary debates about aspirations, masculinity, and authoritarian statecraft.
Carl ROMMEL is a social anthropologist with more than fifteen years’ experience of researching Egyptian society and politics. He is currently a Research Fellow at New Europe College in Bucharest, and a visiting researcher at IREMAM. Rommel has published journal articles on sports, masculinity, revolution, urbanism and “projects” in Greater Cairo. His first monograph was Egypt’s Football Revolution: Emotion, Masculinity, and Uneasy Politics (University of Texas Press, 2021). He is also the co-edited Economies of the Male Body: Productivity, Pathology, and Pleasure in Urban Egypt, which is forthcoming with The American University of Cairo Press. Rommel is currently authoring a second monograph, tentatively titled, Egypt as a Project: Dreamwork and Future-Making in President el-Sisi’s New Republic, for publication with Indiana University Press.
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