Scholarship on Gulf Cooperative Council (GCC) states, which have the highest proportions of migra... more Scholarship on Gulf Cooperative Council (GCC) states, which have the highest proportions of migrants in the world, usually explores how they are unique in their patterns of non-citizen exclusion. However, state discourses, geographies, and the heterogeneity of migration to the Gulf share similar traits with contemporary nations and states. Non-citizens are, as they are everywhere, active participants in Gulf state- and nation-building projects. Aiming to advance scholarship on belonging in the GCC states, in this paper, we propose a shift in focus from exclusion to inclusion in the way research questions are asked about Gulf societies and the people who reside in them. Doing so, we suggest, requires unpacking two hegemonic concepts in the regional studies scholarship: ‘ethnocracy’ and kafala. In their current usage, both terms have become ‘black boxed’, or reified, such that scholars have largely come to accept and reproduce the exceptionalism of the Gulf and refrain from asking a number of critical questions about the region, which might highlight the GCC states' fundamental normalcy. Through a reflexive approach that draws from our own previous and current research in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, we suggest ways that we might move beyond the rigidity of exclusion-centred narratives about the Gulf and instead consider the various ways that Gulf nationalisms themselves hail the non-citizen presence, and how non-citizens participate in discourses and practices of nationalism as well as statecraft in ways that cannot be reduced to nationality, class, race, or religion.
Through ethnographic examples of students' engagement with American universities in the United Ar... more Through ethnographic examples of students' engagement with American universities in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, I argue that branch campuses have a particularly important relationship with emerging forms of racial consciousness, identity, and politicization among students, both citizen and foreign resident. This entry point is one that deliberately foregrounds the parochialism of an American perspective on the future of the academy as part of a broader project of postcolonial and transnational engagement with this new knowledge economy.
Indian communities have existed in the Gulf emirate of Dubai for more than a century. Since the 1... more Indian communities have existed in the Gulf emirate of Dubai for more than a century. Since the 1970s, workers from South Asia have flooded into the emirate, enabling Dubai's huge construction boom. They now compose its largest noncitizen population. Though many migrant families are middle-class and second-, third-, or even fourth-generation residents, Indians cannot become legal citizens of the United Arab Emirates. Instead, they are all classified as temporary guest workers. In Impossible Citizens, Neha Vora draws on her ethnographic research in Dubai's Indian-dominated downtown to explore how Indians live suspended in a state of permanent temporariness.
While their legal status defines them as perpetual outsiders, Indians are integral to the Emirati nation-state and its economy. At the same time, Indians—even those who have established thriving diasporic neighborhoods in the emirate—disavow any interest in formally belonging to Dubai and instead consider India their home. Vora shows how these multiple and conflicting logics of citizenship and belonging contribute to new understandings of contemporary citizenship, migration, and national identity, ones that differ from liberal democratic models and that highlight how Indians, rather than Emiratis, are the quintessential—yet impossible—citizens of Dubai.
in Omar Al-Shehabi, Adam Hanieh, and Abdulhadi Khalaf, Eds. Transit States: Labour, Migration & C... more in Omar Al-Shehabi, Adam Hanieh, and Abdulhadi Khalaf, Eds. Transit States: Labour, Migration & Citizenship in the Gulf: 170-197. Pluto Press.
Over the last decade, the Gulf state of Qatar has invested billions of dollars in American branch... more Over the last decade, the Gulf state of Qatar has invested billions of dollars in American branch campuses as part of its development as a ‘knowledge-based economy’. A knowledge economy will allow Qatar to diversify from petroleum wealth and reduce the country's reliance on foreign labour by introducing more citizens into the workforce, a process called ‘Qatarization’. While intended to bolster nativism, branch campuses are organized around certain Western liberal norms, such as meritocracy, egalitarianism and multiculturalism. These manifest in several ways, including English education, gender integration and a student body that is composed of more non-citizens than Qatari nationals. In this article, I explore how non-citizen students in particular, many of who were born and raised in Qatar, interact with Qatar's new knowledge economy, paying particular attention to the seemingly contradictory models of ‘global citizenship’ on the one hand and ‘Qatarization’ on the other – one a philosophy that is open and inclusive, and the other specifically closed and exclusive.
Like my parents, many post-1965 professional Indian migrants to the United States brought with th... more Like my parents, many post-1965 professional Indian migrants to the United States brought with them live-in domestic workers who were formative in the raising of second-generation South Asian diasporics like myself, often referred to in the literature as ABCDs, or "American-Born Confused Desis." Yet, both in explorations of second-generation South Asian diasporic identity and in more recent work that implicates class in the formation of NRI (Non-Resident Indian) subjects, this population has received little to no attention. Weaving together autoethnography with scholarly literature on both diaspora and domestic work, this article explores the role of domestic work and affective labor in the social reproduction of the Indian American diaspora through the story of Laxmi Soni (via my recollections), who worked as a nanny in my family for over eighteen years. I suggest academic approaches to nannies and other care workers that complicate the class- and race-based analyses that currently exist within the literature on globalization, the feminization of labor, and the so-called "chain of care."
In this article, we provide an unprecedented insider view of the peer-review process. Specificall... more In this article, we provide an unprecedented insider view of the peer-review process. Specifically, we highlight how an author (Vora) revised a manuscript submitted to American Anthropologist in a manner that resulted in its eventual publication in the journal. This included responding in various revisions of the manuscript to comments from the editor (Boellstorff), as well as a reviewer who has agreed to reveal her identity (Karen Ho). By showing examples of this revision process, we explore the “anatomy of an article,” illustrating how a deeper understanding of the peer-review process can contribute to anthropological professionalization and successful publishing.
This article examines the production of belonging and exclusion on a popular English-language blo... more This article examines the production of belonging and exclusion on a popular English-language blog in the United Arab Emirates. The UAE, and particularly the emirate of Dubai, has a large majority foreign resident population, which has little to no access to official citizenship. However, I argue that foreign residents narrate and perform belonging on various scales, including through the production of on-line ‘publics’. As I explore in this article, the differences between citizens and non-citizens are not simply imported into on-line spaces, but on-line spaces and the interactions within them are constitutive of differentiated resident identities. In particular, I explore how the UAE English-language blogosphere is a space for state criticism, assertions of belonging, and interactions by and between groups of people that are not readily available in the rigidly divided social and geographical spaces of Dubai. The ability for citizens and non-citizens to interact in these on-line forums makes the UAE blogosphere a space where assumptions about differences between citizens, expatriates, and migrants that circulate in off-line discourses and technologies of governance are both negotiated and rehearsed by group members and administrators.
"In this article, I consider how the Dubai government’s shift in economic focus from maritime tra... more "In this article, I consider how the Dubai government’s shift in economic focus from maritime trade
networks toward large-scale, Western-style multinational development projects threatened the forms of belonging
that Indian merchants had carved out in the emirate during and after British colonialism in the region, and before
the liberalization of India’s economy, even as Indian merchants were to some extent participants in the production
of Dubai as a “global city.” I argue that Indian merchants were performing forms of substantive citizenship in Dubai
that resemble forms of belonging among South Asian diasporas located in Western liberal democratic contexts. I
explore how this was happening despite the lack of formal modes of citizenship and permanent belonging available
to Indians in contemporary Dubai and in response to changes in Dubai’s migration, economic, and political policies
that reduced their privileged status in the country. [citizenship, merchants, Dubai, India, diaspora]"
Academic investigations of diasporas and transnational networks often consider how economic facto... more Academic investigations of diasporas and transnational networks often consider how economic factors enable forms of movement and identity. In the case of South Asia, scholars have traced how migrations based in indentured labor, trade, and employment opportunities, usually ...
Scholarship on Gulf Cooperative Council (GCC) states, which have the highest proportions of migra... more Scholarship on Gulf Cooperative Council (GCC) states, which have the highest proportions of migrants in the world, usually explores how they are unique in their patterns of non-citizen exclusion. However, state discourses, geographies, and the heterogeneity of migration to the Gulf share similar traits with contemporary nations and states. Non-citizens are, as they are everywhere, active participants in Gulf state- and nation-building projects. Aiming to advance scholarship on belonging in the GCC states, in this paper, we propose a shift in focus from exclusion to inclusion in the way research questions are asked about Gulf societies and the people who reside in them. Doing so, we suggest, requires unpacking two hegemonic concepts in the regional studies scholarship: ‘ethnocracy’ and kafala. In their current usage, both terms have become ‘black boxed’, or reified, such that scholars have largely come to accept and reproduce the exceptionalism of the Gulf and refrain from asking a number of critical questions about the region, which might highlight the GCC states' fundamental normalcy. Through a reflexive approach that draws from our own previous and current research in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, we suggest ways that we might move beyond the rigidity of exclusion-centred narratives about the Gulf and instead consider the various ways that Gulf nationalisms themselves hail the non-citizen presence, and how non-citizens participate in discourses and practices of nationalism as well as statecraft in ways that cannot be reduced to nationality, class, race, or religion.
Through ethnographic examples of students' engagement with American universities in the United Ar... more Through ethnographic examples of students' engagement with American universities in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, I argue that branch campuses have a particularly important relationship with emerging forms of racial consciousness, identity, and politicization among students, both citizen and foreign resident. This entry point is one that deliberately foregrounds the parochialism of an American perspective on the future of the academy as part of a broader project of postcolonial and transnational engagement with this new knowledge economy.
Indian communities have existed in the Gulf emirate of Dubai for more than a century. Since the 1... more Indian communities have existed in the Gulf emirate of Dubai for more than a century. Since the 1970s, workers from South Asia have flooded into the emirate, enabling Dubai's huge construction boom. They now compose its largest noncitizen population. Though many migrant families are middle-class and second-, third-, or even fourth-generation residents, Indians cannot become legal citizens of the United Arab Emirates. Instead, they are all classified as temporary guest workers. In Impossible Citizens, Neha Vora draws on her ethnographic research in Dubai's Indian-dominated downtown to explore how Indians live suspended in a state of permanent temporariness.
While their legal status defines them as perpetual outsiders, Indians are integral to the Emirati nation-state and its economy. At the same time, Indians—even those who have established thriving diasporic neighborhoods in the emirate—disavow any interest in formally belonging to Dubai and instead consider India their home. Vora shows how these multiple and conflicting logics of citizenship and belonging contribute to new understandings of contemporary citizenship, migration, and national identity, ones that differ from liberal democratic models and that highlight how Indians, rather than Emiratis, are the quintessential—yet impossible—citizens of Dubai.
in Omar Al-Shehabi, Adam Hanieh, and Abdulhadi Khalaf, Eds. Transit States: Labour, Migration & C... more in Omar Al-Shehabi, Adam Hanieh, and Abdulhadi Khalaf, Eds. Transit States: Labour, Migration & Citizenship in the Gulf: 170-197. Pluto Press.
Over the last decade, the Gulf state of Qatar has invested billions of dollars in American branch... more Over the last decade, the Gulf state of Qatar has invested billions of dollars in American branch campuses as part of its development as a ‘knowledge-based economy’. A knowledge economy will allow Qatar to diversify from petroleum wealth and reduce the country's reliance on foreign labour by introducing more citizens into the workforce, a process called ‘Qatarization’. While intended to bolster nativism, branch campuses are organized around certain Western liberal norms, such as meritocracy, egalitarianism and multiculturalism. These manifest in several ways, including English education, gender integration and a student body that is composed of more non-citizens than Qatari nationals. In this article, I explore how non-citizen students in particular, many of who were born and raised in Qatar, interact with Qatar's new knowledge economy, paying particular attention to the seemingly contradictory models of ‘global citizenship’ on the one hand and ‘Qatarization’ on the other – one a philosophy that is open and inclusive, and the other specifically closed and exclusive.
Like my parents, many post-1965 professional Indian migrants to the United States brought with th... more Like my parents, many post-1965 professional Indian migrants to the United States brought with them live-in domestic workers who were formative in the raising of second-generation South Asian diasporics like myself, often referred to in the literature as ABCDs, or "American-Born Confused Desis." Yet, both in explorations of second-generation South Asian diasporic identity and in more recent work that implicates class in the formation of NRI (Non-Resident Indian) subjects, this population has received little to no attention. Weaving together autoethnography with scholarly literature on both diaspora and domestic work, this article explores the role of domestic work and affective labor in the social reproduction of the Indian American diaspora through the story of Laxmi Soni (via my recollections), who worked as a nanny in my family for over eighteen years. I suggest academic approaches to nannies and other care workers that complicate the class- and race-based analyses that currently exist within the literature on globalization, the feminization of labor, and the so-called "chain of care."
In this article, we provide an unprecedented insider view of the peer-review process. Specificall... more In this article, we provide an unprecedented insider view of the peer-review process. Specifically, we highlight how an author (Vora) revised a manuscript submitted to American Anthropologist in a manner that resulted in its eventual publication in the journal. This included responding in various revisions of the manuscript to comments from the editor (Boellstorff), as well as a reviewer who has agreed to reveal her identity (Karen Ho). By showing examples of this revision process, we explore the “anatomy of an article,” illustrating how a deeper understanding of the peer-review process can contribute to anthropological professionalization and successful publishing.
This article examines the production of belonging and exclusion on a popular English-language blo... more This article examines the production of belonging and exclusion on a popular English-language blog in the United Arab Emirates. The UAE, and particularly the emirate of Dubai, has a large majority foreign resident population, which has little to no access to official citizenship. However, I argue that foreign residents narrate and perform belonging on various scales, including through the production of on-line ‘publics’. As I explore in this article, the differences between citizens and non-citizens are not simply imported into on-line spaces, but on-line spaces and the interactions within them are constitutive of differentiated resident identities. In particular, I explore how the UAE English-language blogosphere is a space for state criticism, assertions of belonging, and interactions by and between groups of people that are not readily available in the rigidly divided social and geographical spaces of Dubai. The ability for citizens and non-citizens to interact in these on-line forums makes the UAE blogosphere a space where assumptions about differences between citizens, expatriates, and migrants that circulate in off-line discourses and technologies of governance are both negotiated and rehearsed by group members and administrators.
"In this article, I consider how the Dubai government’s shift in economic focus from maritime tra... more "In this article, I consider how the Dubai government’s shift in economic focus from maritime trade
networks toward large-scale, Western-style multinational development projects threatened the forms of belonging
that Indian merchants had carved out in the emirate during and after British colonialism in the region, and before
the liberalization of India’s economy, even as Indian merchants were to some extent participants in the production
of Dubai as a “global city.” I argue that Indian merchants were performing forms of substantive citizenship in Dubai
that resemble forms of belonging among South Asian diasporas located in Western liberal democratic contexts. I
explore how this was happening despite the lack of formal modes of citizenship and permanent belonging available
to Indians in contemporary Dubai and in response to changes in Dubai’s migration, economic, and political policies
that reduced their privileged status in the country. [citizenship, merchants, Dubai, India, diaspora]"
Academic investigations of diasporas and transnational networks often consider how economic facto... more Academic investigations of diasporas and transnational networks often consider how economic factors enable forms of movement and identity. In the case of South Asia, scholars have traced how migrations based in indentured labor, trade, and employment opportunities, usually ...
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Papers by Neha Vora
While their legal status defines them as perpetual outsiders, Indians are integral to the Emirati nation-state and its economy. At the same time, Indians—even those who have established thriving diasporic neighborhoods in the emirate—disavow any interest in formally belonging to Dubai and instead consider India their home. Vora shows how these multiple and conflicting logics of citizenship and belonging contribute to new understandings of contemporary citizenship, migration, and national identity, ones that differ from liberal democratic models and that highlight how Indians, rather than Emiratis, are the quintessential—yet impossible—citizens of Dubai.
networks toward large-scale, Western-style multinational development projects threatened the forms of belonging
that Indian merchants had carved out in the emirate during and after British colonialism in the region, and before
the liberalization of India’s economy, even as Indian merchants were to some extent participants in the production
of Dubai as a “global city.” I argue that Indian merchants were performing forms of substantive citizenship in Dubai
that resemble forms of belonging among South Asian diasporas located in Western liberal democratic contexts. I
explore how this was happening despite the lack of formal modes of citizenship and permanent belonging available
to Indians in contemporary Dubai and in response to changes in Dubai’s migration, economic, and political policies
that reduced their privileged status in the country. [citizenship, merchants, Dubai, India, diaspora]"
While their legal status defines them as perpetual outsiders, Indians are integral to the Emirati nation-state and its economy. At the same time, Indians—even those who have established thriving diasporic neighborhoods in the emirate—disavow any interest in formally belonging to Dubai and instead consider India their home. Vora shows how these multiple and conflicting logics of citizenship and belonging contribute to new understandings of contemporary citizenship, migration, and national identity, ones that differ from liberal democratic models and that highlight how Indians, rather than Emiratis, are the quintessential—yet impossible—citizens of Dubai.
networks toward large-scale, Western-style multinational development projects threatened the forms of belonging
that Indian merchants had carved out in the emirate during and after British colonialism in the region, and before
the liberalization of India’s economy, even as Indian merchants were to some extent participants in the production
of Dubai as a “global city.” I argue that Indian merchants were performing forms of substantive citizenship in Dubai
that resemble forms of belonging among South Asian diasporas located in Western liberal democratic contexts. I
explore how this was happening despite the lack of formal modes of citizenship and permanent belonging available
to Indians in contemporary Dubai and in response to changes in Dubai’s migration, economic, and political policies
that reduced their privileged status in the country. [citizenship, merchants, Dubai, India, diaspora]"