Neha Vora

Teach for Arabia

American Universities, Liberalism, and Transnational Qatar

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Neha Vora is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Lafayette College. She is the author of Impossible Citizens: Dubai's Indian Diaspora (2013).

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 232
• Erscheinungstermin: 11. Dezember 2018
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 213mm x 140mm x 18mm
• Gewicht: 318g
• ISBN-13: 9781503607507
• ISBN-10: 150360750X
• Artikelnr.: 50910828

Autorenporträt

Neha Vora is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Lafayette College. She is the author of Impossible Citizens: Dubai's Indian Diaspora (2013).

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
Introduction: Mythologies of Liberalism
chapter abstract
The introduction presents academic understandings of liberalism,
illiberalism, and the Middle East, and how these inform the sense of
contemporary crisis around the future of American academia, especially as
it globalizes. Critiques by US-based scholars of internationalization
projects reproduce certain mythologies about liberalism, namely that it is
universal, positive, and ahistorical. Nostalgia for a time when the
university was less entangled with projects of capitalism and empire
pervades many of these narratives, and in the process centers a
disembodied, unmarked subject whose belonging within the academy is natural
and unquestioned. The introduction also interrogates contemporary academic
understandings of illiberal places and the cultures, people, and forms of
power that are presumed to map onto them. It highlights how ideas about the
Gulf region were produced through British social science and colonial
practices of proxy governance, as well as through American oil imperialism
and the proliferation of Western expertise.
1Unlearning Knowledge Economy
chapter abstract
Knowledge economy has become a buzzword in Qatar, used to discuss almost
every new development project. This chapter highlights how this concept and
the narratives associated with it function as forms of received knowledge
about Qatar and the Gulf in much academic knowledge production,
institutional rhetoric, and everyday conversation, both inside and outside
the region. This terminology, like other exceptionalizing vocabulary about
the Gulf, forecloses nuanced research and instead invites knowledge
production that reproduces statist interests and the products of previous
and ongoing imperial entanglements. The chapter argues that the rhetorics
of knowledge economy and the actual effects of national development
projects in Qatar are quite divergent, and offers a methodological
intervention into the vocabularies of seeing and knowing higher education,
national development, and forms of belonging in Qatar and the Gulf.
2Pedagogies of Essentialism
chapter abstract
This ethnographic chapter shows how the contradictions between university
mission and liberal celebrations of multiculturalism produced essentialized
ideas about Qatariness, which led to segregation between Qatari and
non-Qatari students. Faculty and administrators at branch campuses
implemented nativist policies and privileged Qataris as the intended
beneficiaries of liberal education, despite ever-present celebrations of
diversity and multiculturalism. The misinterpretation of nation building as
being for nationals only, along with reductive understandings of
Qatariness, naturalized Qatari privilege within campuses, while Qataris
themselves ended up feeling marginalized. Meanwhile, students were
encouraged to interact with each other through essentialized understandings
of difference, which reproduced existing social hierarchies instead of
creating more inclusive campus climates.
3Mixed Meanings
chapter abstract
This chapter focuses on how the category of "Qatari woman" and the
parameters of proper national femininity were produced within Education
City's coeducational spaces. The Qatari state considered women's education
and employment within mixed workplaces essential to modernization, to
transitioning to a knowledge-based economy, and to achieving greater
Qatarization. Yet, gender integration was also considered a threat to
women's bodily purity, reputation, and to the gender roles and norms
attached to Qatar's emergent national identity. The overt and covert ways
coeducational anxiety permeated Education City played out on the bodies and
actions of Qatari women in particular, both as a group to be protected from
criticism, and as the source of gender threat itself. Tasked with playing a
critical role in Qatar's modernization, but also expected to represent a
timeless national culture, young Qatari women constantly negotiated
competing expectations and parameters of what constituted proper
femininity.
4Local Expats
chapter abstract
This chapter pays particular attention to how local expatriate
students-those who were raised in Qatar but had no access to
citizenship-navigated what appeared to be a disjunction between
Qatarization, a policy that structurally favored citizens, and a university
system charged with actively promoting cosmopolitan global citizenship
based on beliefs in individualism and meritocracy. Understanding
contradictions built into their branch campus experiences actually prompted
students to criticize the American academy, which, in their view, failed to
live up to its egalitarian promise, rather than Qatar and its legal
restrictions on foreign residents. Thus students understood that global
citizenship, meritocracy, and egalitarianism, as constituted in the United
Statees, were inherently unequal and did not become less equal or more
flawed when they moved to a supposedly non-liberal space like Qatar. Branch
campuses were increasing their belonging to Qatar and cementing its
transnational future.
5Expat/Expert Camps
chapter abstract
This chapter focuses on the daily lives of faculty and staff in Education
City, recruited mostly from North America and predominantly white. Most of
these expatriates, like their counterparts in other sectors, spend their
days shuttling between various compounds: those of the companies where they
work, the shopping malls and hotels where they spend their leisure time,
and the gated housing communities and high-rise buildings where they live.
Their nationalities in many ways define their mobility and opportunities in
the country, as do their Western professional accreditations, their
English-language skills and-to a large extent-their whiteness. The concept
of the "expert/expat camp" highlights how these subjects are both laborers
who are segregated into compounds and a privileged elite who can enjoy the
pleasures of raced and classed segregation while disavowing their ability
to do anything about structural inequalities within an illiberal,
repressive state.
Conclusion: Anthropology and the Educational Encounter
chapter abstract
The conclusion explores in particular the creation of Hamad bin Khalifa
University (HBKU), which encompasses all of the institutions within
Education City. Education City's ongoing and uneven transition into HBKU
coincided with shifts in Qatar Foundation's rhetoric away from global
education toward local heritage and social formations. The author tracks
her experiences of moving between spaces that increasingly embodied
different epistemologies, gender norms, and social expectations in order to
highlight how, rather than producing a more fractured landscape of higher
education, these changes were quite ordinary reflections of how
institutions incorporate political contestations and calls for greater
representation. The conclusion's title also speaks directly to
anthropology, and to Talal Asad's important volume urging a decolonization
of the discipline-it is perhaps time for anthropologists to also take more
ownership over how their concepts and categories of difference are
problematically deployed across contemporary iterations of liberal
education.