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Al-Muftah, Esraa Ahmad J A

University of British Columbia

Studies on the Internationalization of Higher Education (IoHE) in the Arab Gulf States (AGS) tends to focus on the emergence of satellite branch campuses of various Anglo-American universities in the region, often capturing exclusively the experience of the scholars that come to teach in them from the Global North. There is limited research on what IoHE means from the perspective of public higher education institutions or the scholars ‘at home.’ In this dissertation, I use transnational feminist intervention in globalization studies to contextualize what internationalization means for academic mobility and the politics of knowledge generation at Qatar University (QU) — Qatar's oldest higher education institution. Using occasional participatory observation, qualitative interviews, document analysis, and archival research, I argue that IoHE creates academic spaces governed by differential regimes of (im)mobility that permeate the knowledge generation praxis of academics. QU’s internationalization moves from being driven by Arab, Islamic, anti-colonial and Third-Wordlist notions of solidarity (1973-1993) to a more market-driven competitive form of internationalization in what came to be known as the reform era (2003-2012). As a result of these shifting internationalization paradigms, central factors become contentious, including the language of instruction, gender as a topic and as embodied by scholars, and the nationalities of the faculty body. Within such a shifting paradigm, hierarchies of mobility and access become more visible on campus. They are also continuously transgressed, shedding light on the agency of academics amid these hegemonic modes of internationalization. Broadly, this dissertation contributes to critical internationalization studies by allowing us to imagine an internationalization ‘otherwise’ as revealed in QU’s recent past. Furthermore, using decolonial feminist analysis on (re)memory in educational studies, this study argues that institutions’ pasts continue to haunt our visions of internationalization. For more ethical forms of internationalization to emerge, we must address these past and present-day erasures in higher education institutions to understand how internationalization policies impact the communities they roll out in.

Text

2024-06-30

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/84971

Educational Studies

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/