Sally Findlow

Higher education and linguistic dualism in the Arab Gulf

This paper examines the spread of English as a medium of higher education in the Arab world, addressing questions about the relationship between higher education, language shift and cultural (re)production through such post‐colonial educational bilingualism. Drawing on exploratory ethnographic research, it documents how both Arabic and English have been implicated in the re‐configuring of collective identities through mass higher education in one Arab Gulf country against a context of rapid modernisation with a regional undercurrent of recurrent pan‐Arab and Islamist‐tinged nationalism. It examines how far the resulting linguistic‐cultural dualism amounts to a loss of linguistic–cultural diversity, and how far there is a linguistically‐framed discourse of resistance to such a process. Theoretically, the paper engages with discourses relating to socio‐cultural reproduction, collective identity, educational standardisation, change and cultural chauvinism, and markets. It offers insights into the potential for both language and higher education to act as tools or fields for cultural transformation and for resistance identity construction.

Accountability and innovation in higher education: a disabling tension?

This article is an empirically grounded critical exploration of conflict between two associated higher education agendas – audit‐driven accountability and academic innovation. Feeding into a discourse of quality, audit and power, it considers how far prevailing economic‐bureaucratic models of higher education accountability might actually inhibit the long‐term success of other aspects of the quality agenda, such as innovation. Insider research into innovators’ experiences of constraint in one higher education institution is used to interrogate assumptions about how meaningful academic innovation can be centrally promoted, managed and accountable. Drawing on this case, the article explores what emerges as a central dynamic of tension in relation to issues of cultural capital, trust, risk avoidance, ambivalence and subversion. It suggests that such tension is properly seen as a part of the realignment of fields of academic power, in both the UK and beyond.

International Networking in the United Arab Emirates Higher Education System: Global-Local Tensions.

This paper provides a description of the international networking tensions involved in the recent development of a higher education system in the United Arab Emirates (UAE): a single context offering distinct and variable constructions of ‘local’ and ‘global’. The paper explores contextualised associations of these concepts—or instances between localism and fundamentalism, focusing on pan‐Arab and Egyptian influences in the country as key to understanding the variable boundaries of these networks that support a relativist, situationally constructed reading of the ‘global networking phenomenon’. Within this context, the paper also explores connections between higher education networking, collective identity and state governance; it offers a version of modernism in which nation‐state sovereignty and a networked society, facilitated in a range of ways by a uniquely outward‐looking approach to higher education, are integrally linked, and not dependant on the existence of such ‘global’ norms as constitutional democracy.

Islam, Modernity and Education in the Arab States.

This paper considers the ways in which Arab education systems have responded to the challenges of modernity alongside framing structures of religion. Focusing mainly on the tertiary education sector, it offers a critical overview of the way in which Arab education authorities have sought, collectively and individually, to address both secular and religious fundamentalist demands. It analyses policy and culture in response to econopolitical change, and to shifting perceptions of the functions of education. Engaging with ideas about the relationship between secularism and modernity, it argues that regional patterns of infrastructural engagement with religion have more to do with politics and power than with ideological foundations of culture and society, and challenges, as others have done, the essentialist association of modernity and secularism.

Higher education and feminism in the Arab Gulf

This article explores how higher education is being conceptualized as part of a neo-liberal ‘feminist’ social change project in the post-imperial context of the Arab Gulf. Challenging the tendency to essentialised treatments of gender and women in Muslim countries, it makes visible the diverse experiences and views of a particular group of Gulf purposively sampled women – students, graduates and academics – as it explores how they are situating themselves against available feminist narratives, how they are seeing themselves as citizens and political actors, and how higher education’s spaces and constraints are mediating these processes. A conflicted picture emerges, of mass higher education helping provide women with radical ideas and ambitions, and helping to make public demands and assert self-representation, while their freedoms to act are limited by underlying hegemonic structures that are still predominantly male and against which women variously rationalize their strategic conformity.

Transnational academic capitalism in the Arab Gulf: balancing global and local, and public and private, capitals

This article contributes to the emerging theoretical construct of what has been called ‘transnational academic capitalism’, characterised by the blurring of traditional boundaries between public, private, local, regional and international, and between market-driven and critically transformative higher education visions. Here we examine how these issues are reflected in higher education policy in the Arab Gulf, asking: what kinds of capital are being constructed and traded? By and for whom? What is the relationship between higher education competition, governance and the public good? We find contradictory trends, which we see as strategic ambivalence pointing to country-specific readings of similar regional markets and attempts to hedge bets between rival forms of apparent capital. The exploration offers a counterpoint to more widely cited examples, hereby helping to shape new paradigmatic ‘glocalised’ understandings of this field.

The role of time in policymaking: a Bahraini model of higher education competition

ABSTRACT This paper contributes to discussions about the nature and scope of higher education (HE) business in light of some of the emerging ways in which countries seem to be reframing the impact of globalism. In particular, it develops a discussion about spatialities and temporalities of HE policy by drawing on the Kingdom of Bahrain’s distinctive approach to free markets, transnational capitalism, trade of international services and foreign influence. The paper draws on key HE policy documents and regulatory frameworks issued by the Higher Education Council in Bahrain. In the paper, we ask about priorities that drive HE investment in Bahrain, as well as their impact on the role of international input in HE policy building. We find that policymaking in Bahrain is driven by ‘nationalisation’ as a pragmatic strategy at the time of transition to a knowledge economy. We also find that these goals are transient, thus providing suggestions for policy analysis from the perspective of time intervals in a space.

Comparative and International Perspectives on Educational ‘Spaces’

This review evaluates the contribution of Comparative and International Research in Education: globalisation, context and difference by Michael Crossley & Keith Watson (London: RoutledgeFalmer, 2003) to current efforts at exploring ways forward for comparative education, suggesting alternative ways in which central questions could be approached. It focuses on the notion of balance in policy-theory, insider-outsider, developed-developing world terms, and explores a number of actual and potential approaches towards achieving the kinds of integration that the book recommends. Finally, it argues that it is in this intersection (or balance) that the relevance of such disciplinary reconceptualisation lies for the discussion about ‘European educational research spaces’.