Towards a ‘study at home’ education in the Arab Gulf region: Reterritorializing the ‘study abroad’ model

Drawing on the works of Deleuze and Guattari, which describe the constituent behaviour of cultural assemblages, this article argues that deterritorialization marks the twentieth-century Gulf educational landscape, which problematized Arab Gulf identity. What followed is characterized by what Gilles Deleuze describes as reterritorialization, specifically the proliferation of American and western institutions in the Arab Gulf countries. This article proposes Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of deterritorialization and reterritorialization as lenses through which to observe and respond to the resulting Arab Gulf epistemic and identity crises that arose in part from the ‘study abroad’ model dominating twentieth-century higher education in the Gulf states. In contrast, the ‘study at home’ model becomes an example of reterritorialization, which serves as a local epistemic response to the hegemonic internationalization of education. Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of deterritorialization and reterritorialization provide helpful conceptual tools to examine the western impact on higher education and identity formation in the Arab Gulf region. These two conceptual paradigms characterize two directions in which higher education has progressed during the second half of the twentieth century and well into the beginning of the twenty-first, especially in their intellectual and identity-related aspects. How can Deleuze’s concepts help us characterize an epistemic uqdah that places Arab Gulf education between two antithetical realities: the push towards international education and a sense of adherence to tradition and culture? How does the move for the internationalization of education within the recent history of the Arab Gulf inform identity formation? This conceptual study explores the impact of internationalized education on the Gulf Arab identity from cultural and epistemological perspectives.