Arabian Peninsula جزيرة العرب

In graduate school, as I was preparing to head to the archives, I felt like histories of Arabia and the Gulf were missing stories of everyday life, as well as the voices of people who could slip between official frameworks.

Today, workers in the Arabian Peninsula are unable to form unions and to go on strike to change their working conditions. In the oil industry, most laborers come from South Asia and the Philippines.

In recent years, Saudi Arabia has implemented major changes to its gender and labor policies, rearticulating the role of Saudi women and migrant workers in the economy. Women’s empowerment is at the heart of the Saudi state’s post-Vision 2030 narrative, the government’s strategic blueprint for s..

For some time now, I have been intrigued by the attribution of silence to the Gulf migrants from Kerala regarding their actual lives in the Gulf. As someone who grew up partly in the Dhafra region of Abu Dhabi and is from an extended family who had a significan..

The book tries to understand what it means for the Persian Gulf to be a region and how the multiple conceptions and social processes of region-making reflect struggles and generate conflicts. I have come to think of regionalism as aspirational, representational..

Toby Matthiesen, The Caliph and the Imam: The Making of Sunnism and Shiism (Oxford University Press, 2023).

Most of my research has been conducted in the field of Muslim women’s issues as a minority group. My research deals with women’s struggles for recognition of their ignored or misrecognized gender and religious identities under the rule of secular or/and Islamis..

Studies of migrant labor in the Persian Gulf often generate stereotypical images of Indian men caught in a Faustian bargain: compelled to leave their homes and loved ones in search of employment, or worse, unwittingly ensnared in cycles of debt and exploitation. Andrea Wright’s Between Dream..