Offshore campus development and the worlding of Dubai as an international education hub

This paper investigates how Dubai is materially and semiotically produced as an "international education hub". As part of developmental strategies to build a knowledge-based economy, Dubai's government mobilizes designated infrastructures and policies to attract numerous foreign universities to open offshore campuses in the city and to offer their programs and degrees. Drawing on scholarship on Dubai's (cultural) political economy and on globalizing cities, I conceptualize the positioning of Dubai as an education hub as a worlding strategy of Dubai's government rooted in a reinterpretation of the city's role in the global knowledge-based economy that emphasizes knowledge production. I analyze Dubai's worlding as an education hub through universities' offshore campus investment decisions and business strategies, and show how the education hub strategy is closely entwined with Dubai's hitherto economic positionality, and with urban imaginaries of Dubai as a cosmopolitan spectacle and a city for economic opportunity. I contribute to a better understanding of worlding strategies by empirically showing how cities are being positioned and imagined under the knowledge-based economy. The analysis reveals that worlding cities as an education hub is contradictory and does not challenge existing ideas of global city formation, but reproduces and seeks to geographically shift established global hegemonies.