Qatar has invested billions of dollars in growing its higher education sector over the last two decades. The centerpiece of this investment is the Education City complex, home to branch campuses of six elite American universities. These institutions are part of Qatari leadership’s strategic planning around knowledge economy development, meant to provide citizens with skills to become entrepreneurs, bolster the private sector, and replace foreign professionals, who now control the workforce. Branch campuses, which focus on liberal English-language secular co-education, have however become a source of tension among some Qatari citizens, who see them as emblematic of a turn toward too much Westernization and an erosion of traditional national values, particularly around gender roles and Islam. They also feel that many citizens are excluded from Education City while foreign resident students benefit from its offerings. This paper, through the experiences of different actors as they navigated branch campuses in Education City and their relationships to identity formation, citizenship, nation-building, and imaginings of the future, discusses the role of liberal higher education in the making of transnational Qatar. At the same time, examining the inherent contradictions of American academia from the vantage point of Qatar highlights how ideas about the liberal and the illiberal are constantly emergent, contain within them their own undoing, and reveals investments from both sides of the globe in maintaining mythologies of liberalism and its others.

The city of Cairo contains a number of sites that have been identified and elevated by global discourses about the preservation of cultural history, from the pharaonic era to the period of Islam’s arrival to the material remains of minority histories. These narratives undergird a network of institutional donors, research projects, and circulating experts who excavate, catalog, and restore sites under the auspices of advancing knowledge, through often invisible labor by local experts and managers and with significant investment by the Egyptian state in cultivating tourist dollars. This paper explores the ways in which global expertise and institutional actors working to preserve the antiquities of Fustat intersect with the municipal governance of an adjacent contemporary informal housing area, Ezbet Khairallah. In particular, it focuses on the issues of land tenure and wastewater management as these two overlapping concerns illustrate the formation of new materialities, embodied practices, and imaginaries over the course of the half century of informal housing consolidation in this location. The neighborhood of Ezbet Khairallah is situated on some two square kilometers of land on a rocky plateau south-east of downtown Cairo. The location was set aside in the early 1970s by Presidential decree for the Ma?adi Company for Development and Reconstruction (MCDR) to build a modern, planned suburb. However, this plan was stalled owing to shortage of funds, land tenure advocacy work done by those who later settled on the land as they migrated into the city, and the active opposition of the Ministry of Antiquities due to the proximity to Fustat and Basateen. As Ezbet Khairallah became a densely populated informal housing area, interests from these various parties moved to address the environmental conditions that arose from the excess sewage created there. Through examining the history of land tenure struggles and the recent implementation of wastewater systems in the area, this paper will shed light on how area residents form attachments to and inhabit their material world and imagine possible futures in this location in ways that rework global regimes of antiquity, value and connection to place.

This paper investigates how global discourses about food -- particularly its origin and ways of production – come to Palestine through an often circuitous route and take particular root in Palestine soil at this moment in time. A central tenant of Palestinian resistance has stressed the longevity and the tenacity of Palestinian agriculture (particularly ancient, long-lived, olive trees grown on terraces) employed to counter Zionist assertions of a “land without people.” Recent acts of agricultural resistance draw inspiration on international discourses and movements promoting new agricultural strategies that focus on changing production, circulation and consumption. During my research over the last decade, I have noticed the influences of permaculture, eco-farming, seed banks, anti-GMO discourses, CSA (community-shared agriculture), Slow Food, which have inspired farmers and activists to practice similar forms of “fertile resistance” in Palestine. These cosmopolitan discourses themselves do not face the difficulties of physical movement that Palestinians themselves do because of the checkpoint and permit regimes. Yet when these discourses take root in occupied Palestine, they are employed to draw attention to, circumvent, or ameliorate these infrastructural obstructions. So while children of Palestinian refugees, for instance, become familiar with CSA practices in the US, they transform them when they return to Palestine, invoking how volunteer laborers earning rights in shared, local produce from Palestinian seeds can be a means of subverting the occupation by providing a means of boycotting industrially farmed or produced Israeli goods. I draw on Elaychar’s notion of “phatic labor” to describe how activists in different parts of Palestine maintain connections with each other (or generate new ones) despite the difficulties of movement. They engage in complicated exchanges of knowledges, practices, and tools, as well as art, spaces, and hospitality. They are at pains to separate their productive activities from the “aid industry” activities and their connections, often initially made in shared political activities like olive picking, from the more classically known “wasta” ties which are associated with considerably less inspiring established Palestinian political organizations. These activists also share concerns with reclaiming and sharing Palestinian knowledges about foraging for edible plants, a practice receiving much attention from chefs like of Rene Redzipi of Noma and anthropologists like Anna Tsing, and passing along these embodied ways of seeing and gathering can be preserved and passed along to young Palestinians.

The field of cultural practices, as a space of social, intellectual and economic exchange, seems appealing in Iran today explaining the involvement of various players. For many young Iranians, who are willing to gain access to global culture, artistic practices play an important role in contributing to their experience of subjectivation. But also, the elite that was formed after the revolution of 1979 considers “culture” as a space of opportunity both for building new scales to exercise their power and financial investments. For instance, the development of the art market at the regional and global scales has had local repercussions at the local level(s). The category of intermediary players namely curators, academic and non-academic writers, art experts, “cultural entrepreneurs”, etc. has been shaped thanks to the mobility of art professionals and circulation of ideas and was strengthened gradually leading to the professionalization and institutionalization of artistic practices at the local level. While in a broader neoliberal context, the Iranian state has delegated its responsibility in the field of contemporary art development to various private and semi-private actors, the emergence of Art entrepreneurialism has reconfigured the role of public and private stakeholders in defining cultural policy and managing the relevant spaces. The legitimacy of the private and semi-private sectors is often built upon their access to various spheres of influence at regional and international levels and on the absence of the constraints public stakeholders are often faced with. In addition, the outsourcing of the cultural sector coincides with the ambitions and anxieties of individuals hoping to make new symbolic and financial capital out of a strategic rapprochement with the arts community or art-collecting. This situation has resulted in a monopoly system that has increased the precarity of many artists’ career but also contributed to the emergence of new peripheries that contest the current system. The presentation is based on recent fieldworks carried out in Iran in 2017 and several interviews conducted with Iranian artists and entrepreneurs.