Academic mobility, between the past and the present: The case of Qatar University

• In Event: No politics zone: Educational reform plans in the Arab Gulf States (AGS)

Proposal

In the State of Qatar, the “pursuit of excellence” and the desire to improve rankings in higher education demanded an intensification of internationalization and a move away from the “national development” framework that the state had adopted as part of its nation-building efforts in the late 1970s. Internationalization has come to Qatar’s higher education in various forms, most notably through satellite branch campuses of various universities operating in other countries (e.g., Weil Cornell University, Texas A & M, Georgetown University, etc.). In this presentation, I examine how internationalization unfolded at Qatar’s national university (QU). QU offers a more variegated site of higher education consisting of different constituents – nationals and non-nationals – who have been excluded in the gated satellite campuses of foreign universities. This presentation examines an overlooked dimension of internationalization studies, namely the lived-experience of academics, both nationals and non-nationals, in relation to one another. For this presentation, I use a case study, relying on interviews, document analysis, and occasional participatory observation, to investigate how “internationalization” of higher education creates an academic space governed by differential regimes of (im)mobility and how that may have reproduced structures of dominance and dependency. Using anticolonial feminist traditions and decolonial theory, I question the ways in which policies currently implemented in higher education tend to racialize the non-white academic, while promoting whiteness and masculinity (Takayama, Sriprakash & Connell, 2017; Shahjahan & Morgan, 2015; Ahmed, 2012). In the second part of the presentation I reflect on these current regimes of (im)mobility and power configurations by comparing and contrasting how internationality, and the position of the (inter)national academic, has shifted from the early establishment of QU (1977) to today. The findings show that internationality tended to be driven by the notion of solidarity (South-South cooperation) — unlike today’s internationalization efforts, which tend to be driven by competition. In the latter model, the academic is positioned in a more precarious position, as non-national faculty are present there to serve a more competitive agenda. Hence, while geographic mobility might have intensified in today’s internationalization efforts, this has not translated into more mobility within the institution and academia more broadly, especially for non-white academics who find themselves marginalized further by a desire of their institutions to mimic higher educational institutions in the Global North, in hopes of improving their global educational rankings. This presentation ends with an invitation for (1) ranking entities and other profit-driven entities, governments in the Global South, and university administrators to question their social responsibility when implementing or marketing internationalization policy locally; and (2) academics to reflect on the ways in which internationalization has reconfigured our relationships with one another in this highly competitive educational climate.

Author

• Esraa Al-Muftah, Qatar University / University of British Columbia