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The Cramped and Crowded Room: The Search for a Sense of Belonging Among Temporary Low-Wage Migrant Workers in Dubai
Abstract
In the UAE, migrant workers are excluded from the broader society and denied the right to social, economic, and spatial inclusion. Drawing from the narratives of forty-four temporary low-wage migrant workers from eleven different countries employed in low wage work in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, this study focuses on the scale of the room—the cramped, confined space that low-wage migrants share. It examines the experiences of participants who sat at the margins of the margin through a matrix of mutually reinforcing processes, including the historically rooted contemporary structures that determined the vertical hierarchies established by the socioeconomic elite—along the lines of nationality, race, and ethnicity—and the dominant social relations throughout UAE society. These processes are reinforced spatially through the location of the cramped, confined accommodation within the city and through its conditions. Social exclusion and the devaluing of certain nationalities are further reinforced within the space of worker accommodation in relation to the stratification of low-wage migrant groups whose behavior replicates society’s vertical hierarchies. The room workers shared represented their exclusion from the broader society, from the “real” Dubai, where some groups of migrants believed they had earned their right to belong. The place where they believed they belonged was influenced by who they believed they were. For them, exclusion was a rejection and denial of what they believed they were justly entitled.
Discipline
Sociology
Geographic Area
Gulf
Sub Area
Gulf Studies