Art and networks: The national film school of Denmark’s “Middle East Project”

Within a period of just half a decade, partnerships between political elites in the Middle East and the governing bodies of various top-tier American institutions have led to the creation of a number of high profile (and often architecturally remarkable) branch campuses in the region. A central element in a still-quite-novel “global network university”¹ paradigm, the branch campus phenomenon is associated with those parts of the world—the United States and the United Kingdom—that have traditionally dominated the highest levels of the university league tables. In the Middle East, branch campuses operated by major American research universities with well-established reputations in the area of practice-based film education promise new opportunities for aspiring film practitioners, as well as the kind of capacity building that political elites committed to the development of thriving film industries consider relevant. New York University has operated a branch campus in Abu Dhabi since 2010, Northwestern University has run a campus in Education City, Doha, Qatar, since 2008 (see Hamid Naficy, this volume), and the University of Southern California has a significant presence in the region through the Red Sea Institute of Cinematic Arts in Jordan, which opened its doors to students in 2008. Copyright © 2013 Mette Hjort.