The Moral Ecology of al-Ḥawārī: An Ethnography of Khusus, Cairo.

Lilli Trebs’ research seeks to understand the relationship between space and everyday morality by investigating al-Ḥawārī, the narrow alleys of Cairo’s informal areas, as spaces of moral production, reproduction, and transformation. Drawing on the material and spatial turn in anthropology, the study approaches the ḥawārī as moral ecologies, where the affordances of built and improvised form and material serve as potential ethical infrastructures of its inhabitants’ everyday life. Through ethnographic fieldwork, the study situates the Ḥawārī within Cairo’s broader moral topography, revealing how the city’s stigmatized spaces generate their own architectures of virtue. 

First Supervisor: PD Dr. Samuli Schielke

Second Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Kai Kresse