Few political ethnographies have tracked everyday realities of citizenship before and after the Arab uprisings. This chapter explains the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of the study, situating it in relation to the relevant works on Egypt and the region. It sets out the approach of studying the production of lived and imagined citizenship in schools, situating the study within the sociology and anthropology of education. It identifies the key parameters for approaching lived citizenship in schools in terms of the focus on privatization and austerity on the one hand, and violence and discipline on the other. It charts how the research approaches the production of imagined citizenship in schools through analysis of textbook discourses, rituals and everyday student and teacher narratives.

Chapter 2 examines social science approaches to understanding emotions and their educational implications. It explores fields that study human personal and social life empirically, drawing out patterns and relationships that can inform policy and practice, in education and other fields. Its main task is to introduce, and juxtapose with the mainstream, alternative perspectives on educating emotional virtues which have thus far been left off the table, to highlight the insights of the politics of emotions for emotional virtues education. The first section examines psychological views of emotions as applied in education. The methodology and orientation toward emotions in these approaches are explored at length. The second section of this chapter introduces approaches and views related to the politics of educating emotions, which include insights about emotions developed in social psychology, sociology, feminist theory, cultural studies, and related areas.