Abstract:
In an attempt to understand the Egyptian state’s approach in handling diversity and inclusion in education and offer insights on possible improvements of the current social studies and history textbooks, the study explores the said and the unsaid about Nubian histories, culture, and struggles.
The study deals with the representation of Nubians in two periods, the ancient dynastic period and the contemporary period. In the study, I started by a review of literature that helps in situating the analysis into historical, socio-cultural, and political contexts that are an integral part of conducting a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). I followed this by a spatial quantitative analysis to contextualize the representation of Ancient Nubians vis-a-vis other Ancient civilizations represented in the textbooks. Then I moved to an in-depth qualitative analysis to understand how power dynamics might shape discourses about Nubians in Egyptian education. In the study I employed Fairclough’s (2003) CDA tools to get insights into the discourses around Nubians in selected Egyptian social studies, history, and geography textbooks for the school year 2015/2016, coupled with van Leeuwen’s (2008) tools for analyzing legitimation in discourse and analyzing visual images.
The study results show that the representation of Nubians, especially, in discussing the ancient Nubians in textbooks almost always appears within the discourses of power over Nubians. The dominant discourses include the discourse of superiority and othering, while legitimating power over Nubians for economic and security reasons. On the other hand, the discourses around contemporary Nubians are more inclusive and can be considered as attempts to positively represent Nubians through ‘mentioning’ their culture, histories, and displacement ‘problem’; however these attempts are rather superficial and do not capture the complexity of the Nubian case.
