On the afternoon of 14 December we were happy to welcome Dr. Nadine Scharfenort at our office in Erkner. As the holidays were approaching we were having gingerbread and coffee which created the perfect Christmas mood. Nonetheless we had another very fruitful discussion during this Erkner Encounter.
Nadine Scharfenort, currently visiting professor for “Globalisation, Transformation, Gender” at the department of Human Geography at Freie Universität Berlin, was very interested in our project and shared some insights from her broad knowledge of urban development processes in the Arab Gulf region. We discussed whether there is indeed something that can be described as the “Dubai model” of urban development and how IBCs and transnational urban education zones fit in there. As an additional topic, she raised the issue of gender in the context of IBCs. We discussed the question whether IBCs empower women in the Gulf countries by offering them additional opportunities to obtain higher education or if they are rather restricting them as they offer their parents an opportunity to keep their daughters close and inside the country when they would have otherwise sent them abroad to study.
For more information on Nadine’s work, here are two of here most recent and/or upcoming publications:
- Scharfenort, N. (2018): Willkommen in Silamsi?! – Wahrnehmung und Konfliktpotentiale des arabischen Tourismus in Zell am See-Kaprun. In: Zeitschrift für Tourismuswissenschaft 2 (2018)
- With Al-Hamarneh, A. und J. Margraff (Forthcoming 2019): Neoliberale Stadtentwicklung in der arabischen Welt