LAUSR

Perhaps the most pernicious colonial baggage shaping engagements with the Arab world is gender. Knowledge of the region continues to be constructed upon the juxtaposition of the liberated Western female in the civilized world and the foreveroppressed Arab woman in the uncivilized Arab Muslim world (Abu-Lughod 2002). Educational research is no exception; the supposition of exceptional female oppression colors analysis of educational phenomena in the Arab world. More significantly, I argue, it impedes a genuine interrogation of traditional hierarchies of knowledge and fails to take intersectionality seriously. Such epistemological biases work to devalue forms of knowledge that could help upend the hegemony of neoliberalism in constituting what is valuable knowledge (Mazawi 2010; Shahjahan 2011) and severely limit the decolonizing possibilities of feminist scholarship—defined here as scholarship that centers the experience of people and the complexity of their particular experiences, and is attuned to the ways in which power shapes research and writing (AbuLughod 1991). In this article, I examine two educational trends and consider how neo-colonial means of engaging with the region (particularly in the field of educational development) continue to limit the understanding of these trends and their significance in people’s lives. First, I consider the growing “male crisis” in education in the Arab world and what a decolonizing orientation to this trend might illuminate about inequalities, class, and status. While increasing evidence has emerged that females in the Arab world (like many other regions) are outnumbering and outperforming males by traditional measures, too much attention to these trends leads to a securitization of the “boy problem” and a disregard for critical factors such as teaching, the labor market, and poverty that shape these trends. While some researchers frame these trends as a security threat, others dismiss their significance all together due to the narrow conceptualization of useful education and labor. Second, I consider the case of women in computing fields in the Arab world and the ways in which their participation in these fields complicate the gendered discourse surrounding STEM fields in the United States. The positioning of the West as the central frame of reference for understanding the “gender gap” in STEM assumes that the gender biases in the United States surrounding math and science are universal when in fact there is much evidence to the contrary.