Drawing on a five-year ethnographic study of Qatari national students' experiences in EMI international branch campuses, I examine the integral role that linguistic shame (Liyanage & Canagarajah, 2019) plays in identity construction as students engage with neoliberal, transnational higher education and often navigate different cultural and linguistic norms than members of their family and communities.
In this presentation, I take a critical perspective to examine notions of identity and belonging by Qatari national students who attend mixed gender, English-medium instruction (EMI) international branch campuses in Qatar Foundation's (QF) Education City. In Qatar, these students are often juxtaposed against students who attend Qatar University (QU), the primary national institution of higher education in Qatar, which employs gender segregation policies and offers many of its degrees through Arabic-medium instruction. Drawing on a five-year ethnographic study of QF students' experiences, I specifically examine the integral role that linguistic shame (Liyanage & Canagarajah, 2019) plays in identity construction as QF students engage with neoliberal, transnational higher education and often navigate different cultural and linguistic norms than members of their family and communities. This study follows other "critically-inflected emotion research" (e.g., De Costa, Rawal, & Li, 2018, p. 91) and expands the limited research on shame in applied linguistics by examining it within an EMI and transnational higher education context. I illustrate how students' emotions are shaped by the forces of the macro-level (e.g., language policies, rhetoric of Qatar's leaders), meso-level (e.g., university and home communities) and micro-level (e.g., student identity). This chapter also heeds the call of Golkowska (2016, p. 3) to give more attention to the "lived experience of students negotiating disparate discourses and conflicting cultural value systems, especially in the Middle East."
