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

Abstract

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.

Critical University Studies

“…While activist and scholarly interventions have produced a great deal of change within universities, including shifts in curricular norms, increasing access for historically underrepresented students, and divestment from private prisons and fossil fuels, institutions of higher education have also been able to claim these achievements as part of their branding and represent themselves as sites of liberalism through what Melamed (2011) has coined "neoliberal multiculturalism" (see also Ahmed 2012, Al-Saleh & Vora 2020, Ferguson 2017, Vora 2018. Ferguson (2012Ferguson ( , 2017 has described this process as "archiving": The post-civil rights US university has reassembled itself by incorporating and appropriating the oppositional social movements and alternate forms of knowledge of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s in ways that depoliticize and contain difference (see also Melamed 2011, Weigman 2012.…”

Who will man the rigs when we go?” transnational demographic fever dreams between Qatar and Texas

“…Constantly surveilling their students’ social life, administrators noted that the first two batches of Qatari students had to be forced to mix through group projects and assigned seating. An administrator mentioned his relief when, at some point during the third year, he saw “male and female students sitting together and playing some sort of card game in the common space.” 10 The surveillance of Qatari students’ behavior has led to various forms of segregation and differentiation between Qatari and immigrant students, who make up over half of Texas A&M’s student body (Al-Saleh and Vora, 2020; Vora, 2019).…”