Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how projects format hope in contemporary Egypt. Combining ethnography about small business projects and media analyses about megaprojects, it analyses how “the project form” facilitates imaginative dreams of improved futures and the work required to make such dreams come true.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores “the project” as an organizational form structuring future-oriented imaginations and hopeful paths of transformation in contemporary Egypt. Drawing, on the one hand, on long-term ethnographic research with lower-middle class men who contrive and launch small-scale business projects (mashari‘) in central Cairo (e.g., cafés, taxis, kiosks), and, on the other hand, on media analyses about megaprojects in Egypt’s desert peripheries (also mashari‘), the paper examines a number of small and large examples of what I call “project dreamwork”: a combination of imaginative dreams and future-oriented labor formatted by the project’s recognizable template for planning, action, task coordination, and resource allocations, which transforms space, time, capital and subjectivities in visionary but often also conventional ways. My ethnographic material does not only illustrate that such dreamwork facilitated by projects constitutes an omnipresent pivot of material and imaginative future-making in Egypt today. Reading together data about projects of radically different scales, the paper also suggests that the project form is recognizable enough to cross-fertilize small and large dreams and visions. In Egypt, projects provide a taken-for-granted format for conjuring and working out personal as well as national futures. As differently scaled project dreamwork feed on and off each other, projects, of all kinds and sizes, are rendered all the more attractive.