Teach for Arabia: American Universities, Liberalism, and Transnational Qatar by Neha Vora (review)

Neha Vora, Teach for Arabia: American Universities, Liberalism, and Transnational Qatar. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019. 232 pp.

With a provocative title that inherently questions who might be served and educated best by the branch campuses of top US universities in Qatar and Gulf states, Vora's new book debunks some old myths and reminds readers from the outset that "liberalism has Arabian roots" (18). Vora wonders about and studies the transplant of liberal education into "so-called illiberal" countries like Qatar and other Gulf States. Her timely book offers on-the-ground perspectives of students and faculty in these transplant institutions as they engage with curriculum and one another in a new knowledge economy. The book contributes to scholarship about how the cultural ideological framework of liberalism informs and shapes discourses on educational policies and the restructuring of nationalistic reforms for development across the Arab world.

Vora frames the book through a knowledge economy perspective that is tension filled. For example, throughout the book she examines the effects of educational reform and nationalism as they are enacted in the US branch campuses of the Gulf. As Vora notes, branch campuses such as Education City in Qatar are simultaneously "spaces of contradiction" and "sites of new agencies and belongings" (29). As such, she argues that conceptions of knowledge economy become realigned with on-the-ground Arab nationalist orientations in combination with notions of the civilizing mission of Western knowledge economies. Furthermore, Vora examines the tensions that non-national students—the majority of the student population in the branch campuses—and Qatari students attending college experience, but as the author notes, there is no critical mass of Qatari students, and more importantly, there is little Qatarization of the workforce in this oil-rich Gulf state, wherein most people do not work.

Vora devotes attention to five themes (across five chapters) that characterize academic life at a branch campus such as Education City in Qatar: unlearning knowledge economy, pedagogies of essentialism, mixed meanings, local expatriates, and expatriate/expert camps. In Chapter 1, Vora argues that the Qatari nationalist projects and educational reform efforts are divergent. In Chapter 2, she notes that educators take a culturerelativist approach akin to that of anthropologists in cultivating liberal pedagogies and liberalism. In Chapter 3, Vora examines how state-sponsored feminism and liberal feminism influence women's identities inside coeducational spaces. Chapter 4 focuses on the experiences of expatriates, those students who are non-citizens but grew up in Qatar. In Chapter 5, Vora offers an ethnographic account in the study of her own experiences and those of her colleagues (via pseudonyms) in the elite setting in which they work, closely examining how whiteness and religion offer an insightful context for understanding the "illiberal pleasures afforded to Western and white expatriates living and working in the [Gulf] compounds" (27).

One of the key findings of Vora's fieldwork focuses on the segregation of Qatari students because they do not typically participate in extracurricular activities—i.e., Texas A&M or Carnegie Mellon branch campus orientations, clubs, or dances. Lack of participation in social activities reinforced administrators' views of the Qataris as a homogenous, conservative group, when in fact Qataris, especially women, were not interested in college night events because of high levels of homework and family obligations. Non-nationals, on the other hand, were more likely to participate in the "real college life" that was available as well as the liberal subjectivities as envisioned by the branch campus administrations.

With regard to coeducation and women in the branch campuses, the author discusses her own experiences as a faculty member at the Texas A&M branch. She explores misconceptions of feminisms that characterize Qatari women, in particular, as subjects of college life feminist notions that do not account for their own agency and empowerment. Vora makes the salient point that forms of Islamic feminism are less centered on gender difference and segregation; indeed, they are mainly focused on domestic equality...