This paper examines the economic dimension of identity politics, illustrated in the case study of the NGO Safarni in Cairo, Egypt. Looking at the economic dimensions, I focus on the idea of the "commodity" and the process of. In the first session, the children learn more about the globe, and focus on learning to read a map, and where they can find themselves on it relative to the rest of the world.
For the first seven weeks, the workshops are held accordingly, with children engaged in similar activities about different cultures and societies. During this time, there is an economic exchange between the workers of the organization and the mothers of the children. This ensures the full participation of children in the workshop, as well as the participation of parents in the graduation ceremony at the end of the program.
Methodology
By interweaving the literature with the evidence, rather than placing the relevant literature in its own section separate from the analysis, I found that I could more succinctly address the issues I wanted to discuss in this paper. In the future, I would like to conduct a survey-study among Safarni participants and analyze the language used by children participating in these workshops and how it reflects the ideas presented in this document.
Looking at Safarni as Performance
As seen in the vignette above, the role of the group leaders in the Safarni workshops is to act out an appropriate response from the children and warn them when they do not comply by correcting their language or behavior. This is essential to show the ways in which organization affects the performance of children's identities in the audience. The children make up the audience team, as they do not impose their thoughts and ideology on the volunteers, but instead receive an education.
This picture was taken on "Youmna" (Our Day) in which the children celebrated the ethnic and cultural diversity among themselves as a part. The socio-cultural background of the children participating in the Safarni workshops in Ard al Lewa shapes the way the volunteers interact with them and the way they experience the workshop themselves. Due to the young age of the children, their economic status and the available schooling opportunities, there is a great diversity in the children's ability to read, write and speak in Arabic and English.
In the case of Safarni, the volunteers coordinated their efforts for hours before the arrival of the children and spent hours after the workshop had finished asking and discussing the problems with the day's performance. 22 The idea of the "backstage" is extremely important because it separates the performance itself from the relaxed attitude of the performers before and after. In the process of looking at the commodification of performance in the case of Safarni, one must also examine the setting of the performance, not physically but geo-politically.
The first is political and refers to the power of external coercion that the organization exerts against the social values and norms of children. Second, there is a type of economic interaction between the organization and the families of Arda al Lewa, characterized by the commodification of the Safarni performance as well as the exchange of subsidies for children's participation in the workshop.
Economic Dimensions of Safarni Performances
In the case of Safarni, part of the backstage activity is the organization's effort to fund their projects. This has significant implications for the activity of the organization Safarni on a macroeconomic level. Since Safarni volunteers sell their performance for funding and the parents sell their children's participation for subsidies, the performance of the children (audience) and volunteers (performers) becomes the commodity given value in the exchange with the relative buyers.
Within the case study, Elyachar's abstract "positive relational value" is the concept of diversity, or what sets us apart, and the social capital is simply the wealth gained in the market through the buying and selling of the workshop performances. This dual idea of the "commodity" is important to consider in its two separate parts. Within the context of the performance of identity, this definition becomes critical to look at the process of commodification.
I referred to this earlier in this section as “commodity-as-value”, with an emphasis on the relational creation of the object/commodity through exchange. In Safarni's case study, the concept of a commodity as a "concentrated value" rather than an object leads to the conceptualization of the "exchange value of identity." This is crucial when thinking specifically about diversity teaching, as identity can only have exchange value if there is differentiation in the way participants define themselves. The goods of a performative identity have exchange value only because there are differences in the identities of the participants.
The two definitions of the commodity-as-object and the commodity-as-value are embodied in the differences between the operational and relational definitions of 'diversity'. Here I look at the existence of diversity through performance, and how the bifurcated nature of the. These are examples of the idea of 'diversity-as-value': the children only understand the relational component of diversity, but do not explicitly understand the concept itself.
The idea of the relational definition of diversity is reinforced by the scope of the project in Ard al Lewa.
Political Dimensions of Safarni Performances
The girl refused and continued to sulk in the corner while one of the volunteers attended to her. The director, in the vignette above, had the authority to judge that the boy had shown racist behavior within the context of the problem. What constitutes and does not constitute racist behavior in this context is not as clear as it may seem, and it is through the director's decision to define the actions of the little boy as racist that her show feelings of ultimate authority in the matter. .
Within the context of workshops, this includes the smallest details, even the simple mistake of calling a paint color "gross". This is not just a simple correction of a misused word, but how. In the activity described above, the skin colors that the children create are painted in boxes and the children are told to find a name for their color (refer to the appendix for the English translation). The point is to see that the "wheat" skin is not actually the skin color of the child who created it, the "chocolate" skins do not look similar to each other, and it seems pointless to name a skin color "door". ” But the systematic boxing and labeling of skin color, and therefore race, echoes historical colonial efforts to present global diversity, with Western power controlling what is presented and how it is presented.
In a similar vein, Timothy Mitchell, in his discussion of the Paris Exhibition of 1919, states that "Exhibitions, museums, and other spectacles were not merely reflections of this. He asserts that it is not merely the categorization of things into groupings that the "certainty " of the colonial legacy, but rather it is in the objectification of these categorizations where the true power of colonial dominance takes place. Through the process of teaching children about diversity, the volunteers and the director are involved in the process of.
The role of the director in this whole process is crucial, as a white, Western woman slowly defines 'race', 'gender', 'ethnicity' for these children. The personal is the only political thing there is.'52 Safarni, by not only literally putting race in a box and categorizing the children's language around race and skin color, is emblematic of this death of the worker and the rise of a politicized identity that serves as the new form of economic gain in the modern neoliberal context.
Conclusion
The point of dissecting Safarni's work in this way is to create a link between the objectification of identity and the very nature of the effects of neoliberal market reform. The expansion of the neoliberal market is much more than the sale of an economic unit. By extracting value from the subjective values in which the organization specializes, Safarni participates in the creation of those values which, once constructed, cannot be controlled by either the dominant or the subordinate groups involved.
Diversity issues and initiatives are thought of in political tools, those of colonialism and post-developmental effects in the "Third World". However, I argue that the problem is not the politics of the parties involved: the Franco-American founder asserts her values at low levels. 43 income Children of Cairene or mothers of children who trade their children's time for flour, sugar and oil. Viewing these issues through the lens of the ever-expanding markets of millennial neoliberalism, the changing nature of identity and wealth creation becomes apparent.
The individual is no longer defined as the owner of the commodities they create and own, but rather the individual becomes the commodities themselves. What makes a person different from those around them is what they can sell, and the more one learns to sell their differences, the more successful they will become. Safarni trains low-income refugee children in Cairo to better participate in the new market, adapting what makes them "diverse" to fit market standards of production.
Outside of the refugee context, women's employment initiatives in the developing world also engage these behaviors established for the pursuit of gender equality, but also established to gain wealth by categorizing and defining women. Personal identity is no longer merely political, but this field of politics is governed by the rules of neoliberal economics and it.
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