UC San Diego

This project analyzes cosmopolitanism as a social performance that conceals the categorical inequality between temporary migrants and nationals. While recruited primarily for labor, many temporary migrants live and experience the host community as members of varying degrees. Drawing on 32 months of ethnographic research in Dubai, UAE, I show how the temporary migrants perform their everyday belonging despite the systematic inequalities and state policies preventing their settlement. When states paradoxically implement policies of segregation and political projects of tolerance, migrants respond by employing cosmopolitan narratives to perform their sense of belonging. In this framework, cosmopolitanism addresses the tension between exclusion and emancipation – a context employed by the migrants to build their homes in the legal, social, and temporal sense to feel that they belong to Dubai. Social tensions and segregation notwithstanding, this performance allows the residents – both the nationals and non-nationals alike – to engage with one another in a spirit of civility to interactionally resolve the contradiction of policies. This work underlines the hierarchical inequality that pervades along class, gender, age, national, and racial lines not only between nationals and non-nationals, but also among and within nationals and non-nationals, and the performance of cosmopolitanism that enables a successful coexistence of these groups. In doing so, this study takes an in-depth and often personal look at the everyday lives of temporary migrants, nationals, and even tourists, and their corresponding performances to demonstrate their belonging in relation to the other groups.