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

这个CNIC项目支持两名美国调查人员对阿拉伯湾三个国家的计划访问，他们是纽约锡拉丘兹大学的Natalie Koch博士和宾夕法尼亚州拉斐特学院的Neha Vora博士。他们计划的访问将有助于开发一个多年项目，探索美国式大学在阿拉伯海湾三个主要君主制国家：科威特、卡塔尔和阿拉伯联合酋长国(UAE)的影响，吸引科威特大学、德克萨斯农工大学卡塔尔分校和阿联酋沙迦美国大学的当地合作伙伴参与。在过去的二十年里，海湾合作委员会的大多数国家都制定了计划，通过发展“知识型”经济来摆脱对石油的依赖。这些国家正在大力投资高等教育，并刻意选择采用美国的高等教育模式，鼓励建立美国顶尖大学的分校，寻找美国大学的合作伙伴，甚至重组国家大学，纳入美国式的使命声明、学生公民身份模式和课程设置。采用三国比较的方法，调查人员将使用有针对性的案例研究，并利用他们两个学科--文化人类学和政治地理学--的互补见解，探索关键行为者如何在发展和管理教育学(教师和行政人员)以及在课堂和研究生职业生涯中协商不同的海湾和美国价值体系。这笔CNIC赠款将使私人投资机构和他们的当地合作者能够设计一个混合方法项目，提交给国家科学基金会的文化人类学、地理和空间科学核心项目。这一CNIC项目将有助于在美国和海湾地区的学者之间开展宝贵的合作，以评估自由教育和非自由的国有化政策之间表面上相互冲突的价值体系是如何在当地运作的，并评估最近高等教育转型对海湾国家的影响。他们的结果将有助于为美国关于分校发展和该地区许多其他类型的合作的学术和政策辩论提供信息。迄今为止，关于美国模式的机构在东道国对校园墙以外的影响的人种学研究一直很少。这项由这次规划访问赠款产生的研究将对美国高等教育在海湾阿拉伯国家的公民实践、性别角色和后石油经济未来方面的更广泛影响产生更微妙的理解。这些发现有望与美国政策制定者和美国大学管理者高度相关，因为他们在发展国际分校和外国大学合作伙伴关系的政治和经济方面进行了驾驭。除了为创新的实证和理论研究议程奠定基础，并促进私人投资机构的早期职业发展外，这笔规划赠款还将有助于制定一个高度相关的实用议程，能够向学术界和政策界的广泛受众发表意见。

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.