Negotiating between Cultural and Academic Values Undergraduate Education Choices and Divisions in the State of Qatar

This chapter critically examines undergraduate education choices and divisions in the State of Qatar and explores some of the societal divisions created between Qatari national students who attend mixed-gender, English-medium international branch campuses (IBCs) in Qatar Foundation’s (QF) Education City and students who attend QU, the primary national institution of higher education in Qatar, which employs gender segregation policies and offers many of its degrees in Arabic. I build on previous theoretical discussions of neoliberal “inverted realities,” applying this concept to these two higher education choices in Qatar and the complexity of Qatari national students’ engagement with the neoliberal knowledge economy, as well as how English-medium IBCs influence notions of students’ identity and belonging to the nation. I weave into this discussion the voices of students, drawing on five years of institutional ethnographic research conducted between 2015 and 2020, which focused on Qatari students’ linguistic and educational experiences in English-medium IBCs. I provide examples of how these IBC students negotiated between cultural and academic values in choosing between QF and QU and how they oscillated between discourses of pride and shame as they navigated different linguistic and social worlds than members of their own family or their communities.