Multispecies ecologies of homemaking in the UAE

What does it mean to inhabit urban space with others? This talk explores how human residents of UAE cities, the vast majority of whom are not able to settle permanently, produce home alongside and through their interactions with cats, birds, plants, and each other, within the context of ever-changing urban landscapes. We explore, through “cat walks” and other movements within urban space, the micro-architectures of care through which urban residents create relationships with each other and stake claim to the city. More broadly, the talk uses the Gulf context to encourage a rethinking of what homemaking means, and an unsettling of binaries between migrant and nonmigrant experiences of precarity and (non)belonging.

Neha Vora is Professor of Anthropology in the Department of International Studies at the American University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. Her interdisciplinary research and teaching interests include diasporas and migration. She is the author of Impossible Citizens: Dubai’s Indian Diaspora (Duke University Press, 2013) and Teach for Arabia: American Universities, Liberalism, and Transnational Qatar (Stanford University Press, 2018).

Location: Georgetown University in Qatar, Room 0A13.