Apr 29 (4pm) Natasha Iskander (NYU), Does Skill Make Us Human?: Migrant Workers in 21st-Century Qatar and Beyond (Princeton University Press, 2021). An in-depth look at Qatar’s migrant workers and the place of skill in the language of control and power, in Qatar’s booming construction industry, in the lead-up to the 2022 World Cup, showing how skill distinctions are used to limit freedom, narrow political rights, and even deny access to imagination and desire, and revealing how skill functions as a marker of social difference powerful enough to structure all aspects of social and economic life. (The Global Gulf and Bangladesh). Discussants: Neha Vora and Rachel Sturman. Co-sponsored by the Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies.
Natasha N. Iskander, Associate Professor of Urban Planning and Public Service, conducts research on the relationship between migration and economic development. She looks at the ways that immigration and the movement of people across borders can provide the basis for the creation of new knowledge and of new pathways for political change. She has published widely on these questions, looking specifically at immigration, skill, economic development, and worker rights. Her first book, Creative State: Forty Years of Migration and Development Policy in Morocco and Mexico (Cornell University Press, ILR imprint, 2010), looked at the ways that migrant workers transformed the economic development policies of their countries of origin. Her forthcoming book, Does Skill Make Us Human?: Migrant Workers in 21st Century Qatar and Beyond (Princeton University Press, 2021), examines the use of skill categories to define political personhood, in ways that have become increasingly salient with the hardening borders and the pressures of climate change.
Neha Vora is Associate Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology & Sociology at Lafayette College. Her research and teaching interests include migration, citizenship, higher education, South Asian and Muslim diasporas, gender, liberalism, political economy, and the state, in the Arabian Peninsula region and in the United States. 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). She has also recently published a co-authored book with Ahmed Kanna and Amelie Le Renard, Beyond Exception: New Interpretations of the Arabian Peninsula (Cornell University Press, 2020).
Rachel Sturman is Associate Professor of History & Asian Studies at Bowdoin College. Her work has centered on law, property, and the legal subjecthood of minoritized persons in colonial India and in the indentured labor diaspora, and more recently on urban materiality, labor, and embodied expertise in the city of Mumbai. She is the author of The Government of Social Life in Colonial India: Liberalism, Religious Law & Women’s Rights (Cambridge, 2012), as well as scholarly articles in Comparative Studies in Society & History, The American Historical Review, and other journals. She is currently writing a monograph on the history of the building construction industry in 20th & 21st century Mumbai.