Alternative learning spaces in Cairo: The (re)making of space and real life

This thesis analyzes alternative learning spaces in Cairo. These spaces are considered modes of alternative education, away from the mainstream traditional schooling system. The two key aims of this study are to explore the space-making experiences of the people engaged in these alternative learning spaces as well as the alternative that these spaces represent within and beyond the educational realm. This study discusses the space-making and the alternative question in a thematic manner, with three themes underpinning my thesis. The first theme is "Towards the Space," where I foreground and conceptualize space and its relationship to learning. The second is "Within the Space" where I look at the materiality and relationships of the space, and the final theme is "Beyond the Space" where I build up my main argument that alternative learning spaces in Cairo are more than mere learning spaces. Instead, I argue, they produce an alternative vision of real life that reimagines meanings and different ways of learning and life and accordingly engages with them. A related argument I make is that these spaces are socially constructed as an extension of home. At the heart of this is the role of collective emotions that is significant in space-making. I also reframe the social relations into what I call an alternative community, where I attribute the endurance of such social relations to the Islamic actualization of alternative education found in these spaces. I include in this study two alternative learning spaces, which I refer to as the "alternative school" and the "free-learning space". The main data collection technique I have utilized is online in-depth interviews with the founders, managers, teachers, facilitators as well as parents from the alternative school and the free learning space. I focus my analysis on the time frame during which my study was conducted, 2021-22. As I experienced space at a distance, not firsthand, I engage with it as another spatial dimension. Accordingly, the study focuses on the discursive descriptions of the interlocutors.