Anthropology and the Educational Encounter

This chapter focuses on the author's experiences teaching, researching, and moving between different spaces in Education City, Doha, as it developed and changed during the period of the author's fieldwork. It looks at how Qatar Foundation responded to criticisms, primarily from segments of the citizenry that felt left out of knowledge economy development, through the development of Hamad bin Khalifa University (HBKU). HBKU's formation reconfigured space within the Education City compound and changed the author's everyday mobility within it, as it did her students' and colleagues'. The chapter explores these changes in order to consider how anthropological categories of difference and the university's approach to incorporating oppositional politics migrated along with American institutions, disciplinary formations, and faculty and administrators. While many of these changes, such as moves to segregate formerly coeducational spaces, may have appeared to Western academics as a backlash that fit into their exceptionalizing ideas of Qatari culture and gender norms, or failure of liberalism in illiberal space, oppositional logics were not always pegged to conservative religiosity but rather part of critiques of broader imperial practices within certain, and not all, parts of the country.

Discipline · Liberalism · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Space (punctuation) · Gender Studies · Global Education and Multiculturalism · Higher Education Governance and Development · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Law