Doha Seminar

3 or 4 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

This course, offered in collaboration with NUQ, seeks to locate historical contexts and ideological meanings that underpin Qatar’s complex and varied approaches to nation-building, development, and international influence. Qatar’s process of identity-making, as with all nations and individuals, is internally contested, subject to cultural hybridities, and often is not received as intended by outsiders. Such continually reworked portraits both respond to immediate concerns and try to strike a chord with deeper cultural memories, traditions of the Gulf, and the wider Muslim world whose relationship to Western modernity is still being worked out. This course will examine Qatari and regional debates on religious doctrine, race, class, gender roles, educational change, sports, public art, and media.