Professor Neha Vora (Lafayette College) presents "American Universities, Liberalism and Transnational Qatar"

Qatar has invested billions of dollars in growing its higher education sector over the last two decades.  The centrepiece of this investment is the Education City complex, home to branch campuses of six elite American universities.  The expansion of American higher education into Qatar and other supposedly non-liberal countries has raised concern among US based faculty, who ask whether liberal education can thrive in repressive regimes that suppress free speech, democracy, and activism.  Within Education City's American universities, liberal ideologies manifest in several key ways.  These include co-education, English-language curricula, courses that foster critical thinking and debate, and celebrations of multiculturalism.  These insitutions have also become a source of tension among some Qatari citizens, who see them as emblematic of a turn toward too much Westernisation and an erosion of traditional national values, particularly around gender roles and Islam.  Offering an ethnographically grounded account that centres the unique experiences of different actors as they navigate branch campuses in Education City and their relationships to identity formation, citizenship, nation-building, and imaginings of the future, 'Teach for Arabia' discusses the role of liberal higher education in the making of transnational Qatar.  At the same time, examining the inherent contradictions of American academia from the vantage point of Qatar highlights how ideas about the liberal and the illiberal are constantly emergent, contain within them their own undoing, and reveal statements from both sides of the globe in maintaining mythologies of liberalism and its others.