Mobility, liminality, and embodiment in urban Egypt

In this article, I analyze urban mobilities by looking closely at the lives of a brother and sister from a low-income neighborhood in Cairo, Egypt, and examining their individual mobilities in the context of Victor Turner's work on liminality and Pierre Bourdieu's writing on habitus and bodily hexis. I approach daily mobilities as embodied liminal encounters that are open to multiple possibilities. I show that the liminality of mobility may be the grounds for the reflection and reproduction of social hierarchies but may also create opportunities for questioning and reconfiguring inequalities, particularly in regard to class and gender.