Between global citizenship and Qatarization: negotiating Qatar's new knowledge economy within American branch campuses

Abstract

Over the last decade, the Gulf state of Qatar has invested billions of dollars in American branch campuses as part of its development as a ‘knowledge-based economy’. A knowledge economy will allow Qatar to diversify from petroleum wealth and reduce the country's reliance on foreign labour by introducing more citizens into the workforce, a process called ‘Qatarization’. While intended to bolster nativism, branch campuses are organized around certain Western liberal norms, such as meritocracy, egalitarianism and multiculturalism. These manifest in several ways, including English education, gender integration and a student body that is composed of more non-citizens than Qatari nationals. In this article, I explore how non-citizen students in particular, many of who were born and raised in Qatar, interact with Qatar's new knowledge economy, paying particular attention to the seemingly contradictory models of ‘global citizenship’ on the one hand and ‘Qatarization’ on the other – one a philosophy that is open and inclusive, and the other specifically closed and exclusive.

Keywords:

• global citizenship
• Qatar
• higher education
• knowledge economy
• migration
• Arabian Peninsula

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Peggy Levitt and Pal Nyíri for including me in this special volume and for providing valuable feedback on the article during the review process. Caroline Melly's input on early drafts of the piece was also invaluable, as was feedback from panelists and audience members at the American Anthropology Association meetings in Chicago, the Social Change and Migration in the Gulf Monarchies conference at CERI – Sciences Po, and the University of California Irvine Markets and Money conference.

Funding

The research for this article was funded in part by the Program for the Enhancement of Scholarly and Creative Activities at Texas A&M University.

Notes

1. Education City has recently been merged into one entity called Hamad bin Khalifa University by the Qatar Foundation. However, it is still commonly referred to as Education City and the branch campuses continue to operate as relatively independent institutions.

2. For a similar exploration of K-12 education in the UAE, see Vora (2013).

3. My interview subjects were recruited through email lists of current students and employees at Education City campuses, through word-of-mouth and through snowball sampling. In some cases subjects contacted me because they had heard of my project through peers. Interviews were semi-structured and lasted between forty-five minutes and two hours on average. Only two interviewees were former students, and those interviews did not take place until after the term and grade submission were complete. In all, my interviewees comprised four Qatari students (two men and two women), six foreign resident students (all South Asian and Arab, with the exception of one white American), three faculty members and three administrators. Participant observation took place mainly at TAMUQ, but also at Georgetown, at the Education City student centre and at Carnegie Mellon. I also draw from my own teaching and working experiences here as part of this ethnography.

4. See, for example, a recent letter from Yale faculty to the American Association of University Professors criticizing Yale's presence in Singapore: http://www.aaup.org/news/2012/open-letter-aaup-yale-community

5. Lim's argument here is about differences in curricula, aesthetics, financial investment and programming, rather than about which clients branch campuses are aimed at – ‘local’ or international students.

6. In addition, the ‘local’ is a space that is always already cosmopolitan and embedded in transnational ‘global’ networks, rather than a space to which the global is brought by these institutions.

7. See also Levitt and Merry (2009) for an exploration of how certain ideas and approaches become understood as global and others as vernacular.

Additional information

Funding

Funding: The research for this article was funded in part by the Program for the Enhancement of Scholarly and Creative Activities at Texas A&M University.

Notes on contributors

Neha Vora

NEHA VORA is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology & Sociology at Lafayette College.