Service Learning: Oil, International Education, and Texas’s Corporate Cold War*

Beasley, Betsy A.

doi:10.1093/dh/dhx053

Cited by 7 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…Universities further facilitated colonization and imperialism by producing knowledge and labor to render the land productive for capital accumulation-ranging from agricultural extension schools to refining methods for fossil fuel extraction and arid lands expertise (Koch, 2023;Tretter, 2020). The educational and research infrastructure developed through this colonial relationship to land's commodification allowed for U.S. universities to be uniquely positioned in the global neoliberal counter-revolution and materially shape urbanization processes (Baldwin, 2021), resource extraction (Al-Saleh, 2022;Beasley, 2018), and development practices and ideologies (Kamola, 2019).…”

Section: Political Ecologies Of the University And Landmentioning

confidence: 99%

Political ecologies of a university and land at Cairo's urban periphery: The American University in Cairo's suburban desert campus

Al-Saleh,

Arefin

2023

Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space

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In 2008, the American University in Cairo (AUC) moved from its downtown campus in Tahrir Square to the center of New Cairo. Through an analysis of AUC's historical land acquisitions at Cairo's urban periphery, this article examines how the university sought to influence land use over the past century. We argue that AUC's relatively recent role in New Cairo is an expression of the institution's century-long aspirations to acquire land on Cairo's periphery for a permanent suburban style campus. Drawing on the tools of political ecology and critical university studies, we trace how a suburban desert campus is consistently envisioned as a mechanism for the institution to play a significant role in influencing land politics and use in and beyond its campus. We highlight two key ways that AUC has historically situated itself in the city's development. First, purchasing land in order to relocate to the outskirts of the city has been central to AUC's strategy for accumulating wealth to ensure its long-term presence in Egypt. Second, acquiring large tracts of land for a suburban desert campus has been instrumental to AUC's educational mission to shape its student body, Egyptian society, and the political ecology of desert land in Egypt. Through archival research, we show how AUC's relationship to land positions the university as a significant institutional force in Cairo's rapidly urbanizing desert periphery. This situated case study contributes to an emerging body of scholarship examining the fraught historical and contemporary relationship between universities, land, environmental knowledge, and uneven urbanization in the Middle East and beyond.

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Section: Political Ecologies Of the University And Landmentioning

confidence: 99%

Political ecologies of a university and land at Cairo's urban periphery: The American University in Cairo's suburban desert campus

Al-Saleh,

Arefin

2023

Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space

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“…The university, which has graduated over 1000 engineers since 2003, positions itself as training Qatar's engineering leaders. The contemporary role of Texas A&M in the Gulf has a history that extends to the 1960 and 1970s, when Texas-based oil companies developed a strategy to deal with decolonization and the nationalization of oil fields by expanding their efforts to sponsor international students to study abroad at U.S. universities (Beasley, 2017). This educational partnership enabled oil companies to strategically reinforce "the idea that the U.S. was the center of training and expertise serving an integrated global economy rather than controlling that economy" (ibid:188-189).…”

Section: Context: De-exceptionalizing the Education Of Qatari Womenmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Al-Saleh

2022

Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space

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The educational project of producing engineers in Qatar is uniquely embedded in global capitalism, particularly as a field closely tied to the development of the oil and gas industry, the military and logistics spaces across the Gulf. Over the past two decades, U.S. universities based in the region have become significant spaces where new generations of managerial engineering labor are educated. Drawing on 18 months of institutional ethnographic research, I examine Texas A&M University at Qatar’s (TAMUQ) role in managing the gender demographics of Qatari engineering labor and the experiences of students navigating these institutional mechanisms. The increasing number of women studying at Texas A&M’s engineering branch campus are publicly celebrated by the university as the embodiment of progress in Qatar. At the same time, TAMUQ has worked to mitigate the feminization of engineering through outreach activities that present engineering as a masculine patriotic endeavor. To unpack these contradictory tendencies, I build on the feminist concept of “demographic fever dreams.” Through an examination of contradictory population-based anxieties about Qatari engineering students, I argue that a U.S. land-grant university is a participant and driver of fantasies and fears regarding the future of racialized and gendered labor hierarchies and fossil-fueled capitalism in the Gulf. In doing so, this article offers a grounded feminist intervention to examine the connections between transnational education, U.S. hegemony, and the fossil fuel industry.

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U.S. Power in a Material World

Friedman¹

2020

A Companion to U.S. Foreign Relations

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Service Learning: Oil, International Education, and Texas’s Corporate Cold War*

Cited by 7 publications

References 0 publications

Political ecologies of a university and land at Cairo's urban periphery: The American University in Cairo's suburban desert campus

Political ecologies of a university and land at Cairo's urban periphery: The American University in Cairo's suburban desert campus

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

U.S. Power in a Material World

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