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Contestations of Imperial Citizenship: Student Protest and Organizing in Qatar's Education City

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 December 2020

Danya Al-Saleh  and
Neha Vora
Danya Al-Saleh
Affiliation:
Department of Geography, University of Wisconsin Madison, Madison, WI53706
Neha Vora*
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology & Sociology, Lafayette College, Easton, PA18042
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail:voran@lafayette.edu
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Extract

Texas A&M, a public land grant university in College Station, Texas, has a long history of engagement with the Bush family. These ties highlight the university's entanglement with US imperial enterprises, which extend into the Persian Gulf. George H. W. Bush's own explanation of why he decided to place his presidential library at the campus despite not attending Texas A&M focused on these connections: “Over the years, Aggies have provided great service to the Armed Forces of our country. Patriotism abounds at A&M.” Meanwhile, Qatar hosts the largest concentration of US troops abroad. The US military's Central Command is at Al Udeid Air Base, not far from the Education City complex that hosts TAMUQ and several branch campuses of American and other foreign universities. The students at these institutions are Qatari citizens, South Asian and Arab immigrants, and international students, primarily from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

Type
Roundtable
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 52 , Issue 4 , November 2020 , pp. 733 - 739
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

1 Aggie is the term for a member of the Texas A&M community.

2 US branch campuses in Education City include Georgetown University at Qatar, Weill Cornell Medicine–Qatar, Northwestern University in Qatar, Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts in Qatar, Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar, and Texas A&M University at Qatar.

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6 Sentient magazine, “Freedom of Expression in Student Run Clubs,” Instagram post, 7 November 2019, https://www.instagram.com/sentient.magazine.

7 As with the Orientalist framing of the institutional response to the NU–Q students—that NU–Q had successfully taught the Qatar students how to practice freedom of speech—the co-optation of student movements by the administration is common to US universities. One prominent example is UC Berkeley's celebration of the “Free Speech Movement,” while at the same time the UC system has actively suppressed contemporary student organizing, such as for the Occupy movement and the COLA (cost of living adjustment) strike.

8 Heena Srivastava, Kalen Luciano, and Dan Hu, “NU Declassified: University President Morton Schapiro talks with The Daily,” Daily Northwestern, 6 March 2020, https://dailynorthwestern.com/2020/03/06/lateststories/president-morton-schapiro-talks-with-the-daily.

9 Sirri, Omar, “BDS in a Time of Precarity: Graduate Students, Untenured Faculty, and Solidarity with Palestine,” Middle East Report 281 (2016): 44–48Google Scholar.

10 Desi is a commonly used term for South Asian in the Gulf region and among South Asian diasporas globally.

11 Palestinian Cultural Club Constitution and By-Laws, Article IV: Ethical Code of Conduct, Texas A&M University at Qatar, 2019, https://tamuqatar.campuslabs.com/engage/organization/pcc.

12 Chatterjee, Piya and Maira, Sunaina, eds., The Imperial University (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Waad Abrahim et al., “Racism at NYU in Abu Dhabi: A Global Problem at a Global University,” Gazelle, 5 June 2020, https://www.thegazelle.org/issue/179/features/racism-nyu-abu-dhabi-global-issue?fbclid=IwAR2ShDVaukefrfLivQKoFt7SZIWbskL1KOBou5uctS2rgLkbKC1mtQk4glU.

14 African Students Association (NU–Q), Twitter post, 7 June 2020, https:/ /twitter.com/ASA_NUQ/status/1269519897069002752. In the weeks immediately following the murder of George Floyd, Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts in Qatar and Georgetown University at Qatar were the only branch campuses that organized events that facilitated discussion regarding the relationship between uprisings and protests about systemic racism in the US and issues in Qatar.

15 Our understanding of racism and American exceptionalism in the Arabian Peninsula is informed by Ruth Wilson-Gilmore's definition of racism as “the state-sanctioned or extra-legal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death” in Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007), 28.