Arab Gulf cities are home to some of the most diverse urban societies in the world today – a diversity that is at once the product of exclusionary policies and substantial migration flows. What does this paradox reveal about how urban environments shape contemporary subjects?
This context offers important insights into some of the major anthropological puzzles of our time. It questions the place of strangers in societies where the boundaries of the nation-state are increasingly challenged and bypassed, despite strong nationalist rhetorics. It asks how social hierarchies are reconfigured in contexts of cultural complexity, where different regimes of norms coexist and intersect. And it confronts state-produced conceptions of the future with the lived temporalities of individuals.
As an anthropologist working from Abu Dhabi – where I live, conduct research, and teach – I bring these questions together through an ethnography of youth, attentive to questions of migration, urbanity, and belonging. This website gathers the interdisciplinary projects, publications, and pedagogical tools that make up this inquiry.