Over the past two decades, tens of thousands of migrant domestic workers in Kuwait have developed newfound Islamic pieties. Occurring in a much maligned and understudied region--the Arabian Peninsula--this widespread phenomenon has either been elided, cynically dismissed, or the motivations for these conversions and their socio-historical conditions of possibility assumed. Based on over two years of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Kuwait and South Asia, this paper analyzes how domestic workers themselves' discuss their newfound pieties. Domestic workers' articulations, focusing on 'house-talk,' suggest a shift in analytic focus, one emphasizing their everyday relations and activities within households--relations and activities configured through gendered understandings and practices--as generative of their newfound Islamic pieties. Domestic workers' experience becoming Muslim not as a radical break from their previous relationships and religious practices, but as a gradual reworking of them. House-talk and domestic workers' newfound Islamic point to household as gendered spaces of confluence between Islamic ethical practice and the affective and immaterial labour entailed by domestic work, and between global Islam and the feminization of transnational labour migration that marks our contemporary world.

In the last two decades we have seen a global increase in what scholars term the 'feminization of migration'. Migration to the Gulf in particular has become increasingly feminized, with the vast majority of female migrants looking for employment in the informal economy or the semi-formal domestic work/entertainment/care industries (these slashes do not imply that these industries demand the same type of labor, but rather, that those participating in one industry often either migrate to another or engage in multiple industries at the same time). The feminization of migration necessarily interacts and reacts volatilely with a whole host of theoretical debates and practical realities defining the beginning of the 21st century. The movement of female bodies can be viewed through multiple and overlapping lenses: gender inequality and discrimination, the politics and instrumentalization of citizenship, security concerns in a post 9-11 world, and radical reconfigurations of the normative nuclear family in both the developed and developing world due to distinct but interrelated issues of economic participation and marginalization, disease, and war. This presentation looks at gender, labor, migration and 'trafficking' in Dubai. Around the world today, conversations about labor, migration, sex work and trafficking have been on a collision course. In the Middle East, Dubai has become the center for labor migration and has been accused of being a 'hotbed of trafficking'. The constructions of 'trafficked victim' and 'migrant worker' are highly gendered, raced and sexualized. Qualitative, ethnographic fieldwork with sex workers, migrant women, and those that provide services to them assessed the experiences of migrant women and sex workers, labeled as "trafficked" by the international community. The presentation seeks to describe the experiences of these migrant women in the Middle East, and how their narratives have been constructed and mis-heard by policy makers and activists seeking to legislate on and label their experiences.

The petroleum-rich states of the Arabian Peninsula comprise one of the principal transnational destinations for the global movement of labor. In the Gulf States, much of that labor force comes from South Asia. Legions of unskilled male laborers are typically housed in labor camps, a nomenclature that masks a wide variety of both formal and informal accommodation that, in spatial terms, is a fundamental mechanism for the social segregation of this foreign labor force from the citizenry. Building upon recent ethnographic fieldwork in the labor camps of Doha, Qatar, this paper examines the myths and narratives that proliferate amongst the South Asian men in these labor camps -- men who, often despite years of experience in the Gulf States, typically have little or no interaction with the native citizenry. This paper suggests that these myths and stories can be understood as instruments of governance, in that they portray the collectively-established boundaries of appropriate behavior in a culture foreign to the these unskilled laborers. A close analysis of the content of these myths and rumors, however, also helps us grapple with the connections and contradictions between power, race, class, ethnicity, nationality, religion, gender and sexuality in the extraordinarily heterogeneous context of the contemporary Gulf State. As such, the analysis not only sheds light on the experiences of these foreign men and women, but also their collective understanding of that experience and of the society that hosts them.

This paper examines the migration of an institution--the American university--into the Gulf Arab states, paying particular attention to the gendered and ethnicized aspects of the implementation and effects of these universities in Education City, Qatar. Operating as a "universal" form that can be transplanted around the world, how do American universities adapt to local pressures and customsu And, given these universities' stated commitments to equal access to education and academic freedom, how do students from different racial, gendered, religious and national backgrounds experience the supposedly equal space of the American branch campush Based on preliminary findings from interviews with students, administrators, and faculty both at US branch campuses in Qatar and their home institutions, this paper explores how cultural norms are negotiated in the planning of campus environments--how do schools address the fact that many students have grown up in gender-segregated education, for exampler How are women's sports run in contexts where there are stricter dress codes for womens How do citizens and foreign residents, who have very differential access to rights and services in Qatar, interact within the classroom setting, when most have previously attended schools that were nationally or ethnically homogenous What are the expectations of non-citizens in terms of rights and residency following graduation In effect, this paper is a preliminary ethnographic exploration of the particular manifestations of American universities in the Gulf. I argue that the importation of learning environments is decidedly not universal and requires an entanglement and negotiation of localized cultural expectations, particularly as they pertain to gender and nationality/ethnicity.