Collaborative Research: US-KU-QA-AE Planning Visit - The Impact of American Higher Education in the Gulf Arab States

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This CNIC project supports a planning visit to three countries in the Arabian Gulf by two US Investigators, Dr. Natalie Koch of Syracuse University in New York and Dr. Neha Vora of Lafayette College in Pennsylvania. Their planning visit will help develop a multi-year project that explores the impacts of American-style universities in three key monarchies in the Arab Gulf: Kuwait, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), engaging local partners at the University of Kuwait, Texas A&M University-Qatar, and the American University of Sharjah in the UAE. Over the last two decades, most states of the GCC (Gulf Cooperative Council) have established programs to move away from petroleum reliance through the development of "knowledge-based" economies. These countries are investing heavily in higher education, and have deliberately chosen to adopt US models of higher education, encouraging the establishment of branch campuses of top American universities, seeking out US university partnerships, and even restructured national universities to include American-style mission statements, student citizenship models and curricular offerings. Adopting a three-country comparative approach, the investigators will use targeted case studies and draw upon the complementary insights of their two disciplines, cultural anthropology and political geography, to explore how key actors negotiate different Gulf and American value systems in developing and administering pedagogy (faculty and administrators) and in the classroom and postgraduate careers (students). This CNIC grant will enable the PIs and their local collaborators to design a mixed-methods project to be submitted to the NSF core programs in Cultural Anthropology and Geography and Spatial Sciences. This CNIC project will help develop a valuable collaboration between American and Gulf-based scholars to evaluate how the ostensibly conflicting value systems between liberal education and non-liberal nationalization policies operate on the ground and assessing the impact of recent higher education transformations on Gulf countries. Their results will help inform academic and policy debates in the U.S. regarding the development of branch campuses and many other types of collaborations in the region.There has been minimal ethnographic research to date on the impacts US-modeled institutions are having in their host countries beyond the campus walls. The study resulting from this planning visit grant will develop a more nuanced understanding of the broader impacts of American higher education in the Gulf Arab states in terms of citizenship practices, gender roles, and post-oil economic futures. The findings promise to be highly relevant to U.S. policy-makers and U.S. university administrators, as they navigate the politics and economics of developing international branch campuses and foreign university partnerships. In addition to laying the groundwork for an innovative empirical and theoretical research agenda and promoting the early-career development of the PIs, this planning grant will help develop a highly relevant practical agenda that can speak to a broad audience within both academic and policy circles.