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

Abstract

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.

Gateway cities for transnational higher education? Doha, Dubai and Ras al‐Khaimah as regional amplifiers in networks of the ‘global knowledge‐based economy’

“…Over half of all offshore campus students in Dubai, for example, are enrolled in business‐related programmes (Knowledge and Human Development Authority, 2017), feeding into the city's internationally coupled service and trade economy. There are similar tendencies in the other cities, for example, the relationship between Doha's Texas A&M campus and the transnationally organized oil and gas industry (Al‐Saleh, 2022). Most university managers echoed the government administrators in their explanations of how their graduates are crucial for the international trajectory the governments have chosen for economic development: ‘We supply people who are able to think critically across the board, who are numerate and literate, and who know how the world works, and how the local and regional fit to the global’ (offshore campus manager in Doha).…”

“…Kleibert et al (2020) have identified 487 offshore campuses operating in various forms and sizes worldwide, with most campuses being exported from the industrialized global North to Southeast Asia and the West Asia and North Africa (WANA) region. So far, the phenomenon has largely attracted scholarship from managerial and education studies (Kosmützky, 2018;Wilkins & Huisman, 2012) although some geographers have started to conceptualize its wider socio-spatial implications (Al-Saleh, 2022;Koch, 2016). More research is required on how such transnationally mobile universities are entangled with the positionalities of the cities they go to.…”

“…The US campuses in Qatar's Education City are an exception. According to the managers, Qatari students comprise about a third of their overall student body, and the majority is female (see also al-Saleh, 2022). A government administrator explained that most influential families seek to place their children at these institutions to equip them with prestige and international exposure that reproduce their elite social rank without having to send them abroad.…”

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

“…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).…”