Ahmed Amin

Abstract

In this project, I de-naturalize dynamics of the establishment of social entrepreneurship as a political project that has on the underside of it after-modern passions and desires with an affinity to the European Renaissance and the West as, according to Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “a project not a place, a multi-layered enterprise in transparent universality” (Trouillot, 1991: 32). I purse de-naturalization through de-scription. I de-scribe and trace relationships and inter-actions that are made and re-made in the name of social entrepreneurship. In those very inter-actions, entrepreneurial bodies are re-assembled. According to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987), “we know nothing about a body until we know what it can do” (p. 257). Hence the emphasis on actions. As such, the political becomes a mode of organization and distribution of solutions that entrepreneurs assemble around contesting and conflicting needs, wants and desires. Often-times, those needs, wants and desires are made visible through acts of making and re-making of containers, such as the Social Entrepreneur and the Bedouin. I do not understand those containers as actors, but actants. According to Bruno Latour (2005), actants is the activity of translation and mediation of actions. Those actions take place in the milieu of the after-modern. That milieu is a continuum that exists in mesh of different lifeworlds. Hence, there is no singular contemporary that prevails and dominates. Each lifeworld has its own contemporary, make and is made by other lifeworlds. In that sense, markets are not only the way ahead; life unfolds as one acts; there are no linear movements. I focus on processes and multiplicities of actions that make and re-make the contemporary whenever it is experienced. I in-turn do not trace the what, but the how. In specific, how individuals enter and exit market relationships through acts of setting prices of products and engaging in activities to acquire a formal status of their businesses. In those very processes, intimacies of life such as family, home and security acquire and grant meanings not only to actors, but to actions. I trace those actions through focusing on moments of, according to Bruno Latour (2013), double click. It is a moment when power materializers to re-configure socialites and life itself. In this project, I am using double click as a method in order to trace changing modes of existence. It is a method that I use to de-scribe relational traces that are in-action. By socialities, I mean relationships that are being made and remade in the name of social entrepreneurship.

Degree Name

MA in Sociology-Anthropology

Graduation Date

6-1-2018

Submission Date

May 2018

First Advisor

Khayyat, Munira

Committee Member 1

(1) Sabea (2) Rieker, (1) Hanan (2) Martina

Extent

152 p.

Document Type

Master's Thesis

Rights

The author retains all rights with regard to copyright. The author certifies that written permission from the owner(s) of third-party copyrighted matter included in the thesis, dissertation, paper, or record of study has been obtained. The author further certifies that IRB approval has been obtained for this thesis, or that IRB approval is not necessary for this thesis. Insofar as this thesis, dissertation, paper, or record of study is an educational record as defined in the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) (20 USC 1232g), the author has granted consent to disclosure of it to anyone who requests a copy.

Institutional Review Board (IRB) Approval

Approval has been obtained for this item

Comments

I am so humbled by the support and effort that my committee and colleagues put to make this project see the light. In addition, I would like to thank my interlocutors who I met them either through their writings or our conversations during my fieldwork. This project is a product of those discussions and dialogues that took place in mornings and nights during a span of two years of fieldwork. I wish to thank my supervisor, Dr. Munira Khayyat who introduced me to Anthropological writings and taught me the essence of doing ethnography. In addition, I cannot be more grateful to discussions I had with Dr. Hanan Sabea and Dr. Martina Reiker during in-class and off-class gatherings. They introduced me to contemporary debates about political economy, as well as critical and economic geography that I engaged in my project, and helped me build on them. One cannot help himself but think of different faces and names that are so alive in the discussions I bring to this project. I talk about talks in-between classes and during cigarette breaks. Those in-between moments in which comments were thrown on bafflements we, as a cohort, encounter when we try to understand the contemporary or simply stated, what is going on. Last but not least, I am in gracious gratitude to my wife, Hana. I am so thankful to how she put up with how shaky my life is. I stated a glimpse of how turbulent it is in the prologue, yet I am grateful to how life is unfolding at the moment. I realized that meaning that sometimes I search for in life does not lie in goals that I seek but in relationships I build.

Download

Share

COinS