Neha Vora
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 101256 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Neha Vora |
| NOMBRES | Neha |
| APELLIDO | Vora |
| FIRMA | VORA N |
| AFILIACIONES | Lafayette College |
| ORCID | 0009-0000-7615-2076 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 33 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 229 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 33 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2008 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 8 |
Kimmy and Jules
When I started a research project on stray cat care in the United Arab Emirates and moved here with my three cats soon after, I did not expect my experiences to create a moral conflict around animal welfare practices and being a pet parent. Here, I explore—through my experiences of participating in TNR (Trap, Neuter, and Return) and adopting cats from my university campus—how both animal welfare and pet ownership are infused with violence and ine…
New Cartographies of Belonging and Exclusion in the United Arab Emirates
This article explores how recent policies of inclusion and exclusion in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) might be impacting South Asian diasporic communities and decision-making around immigration. We focus on the ‘Golden Visa’, which allows middle-class and elite immigrants in the UAE access to semi-permanence and a way around the entrenched kafala system of temporary migrant sponsorship. We consider how the Gulf migration regime is influenced by …
US Higher education and fossil fuels
US universities have positioned themselves in recent years as sites of progressive green action, cutting-edge research, and student-driven change. These universities have even been exported to wealthy oil-dependent states in the Arabian Peninsula under the guise of developing their societies away from fossil fuels through liberal education. These countries, however, have developed their national strategies within imperial relationships with Great…
What does it mean to be a citizen in the contemporary moment
This commentary on the set of articles for the "Citizenship, Solidarity, and Nonbelonging" forum considers ways that relationships between states and residents are being reconfigured in the wake of environmental, technological, and economic changes. It also questions the concept of liberal citizenship as a framework for understanding contemporary political subjectivity
Critical University Studies
In this article, we explore critical university studies (CUS), an interdisciplinary body of scholarship that interrogates structures of higher education and their entanglements with national and global institutions and political movements. Favoring an expansive definition of CUS, we draw from scholars who trace the origins of the American university to the slave trade, racial science, and Native American ethnic cleansing projects, as well as scho…
The 2022 World Cup and Migrants' Rights in Qatar
Since winning the bid to host the 2022 World Cup, the Qatari government has channelled billions of dollars into infrastructural development to prepare for the tournament, which has ramped up the country's already high reliance on migrant labour. The international spotlight on migrant labour abuse has also become more intense as the date of the event approaches. Yet, human rights discourses surrounding World Cup 2022 continue to paint a simplistic…
Space, Mobility, and Shifting Identities in the Constitution of the “Field”
This chapter reflects on the experiences of the authors during a combined three decades of research in Dubai, Doha, and Riyadh, highlighting their shifting and contingent subject positions as they moved through urban spaces in the Arabian Peninsula and interacted with various interlocutors during their dissertation research. It examines how prevalent ideas about identity in North American and European societies, which have heavily influenced post…
Conclusion
This concluding chapter explores the question of what decolonized ethnography and academia can look like. It argues that de-exceptionalizing the Arabian Peninsula as a field site requires deconstructing an idealized vision of Western academia as a presumed site of democracy and liberalism. The projects of anthropology and sociology, as they have been invested in anticolonial and antiracist justice and breaking down binary understandings between E…
Anthropology and the Educational Encounter
This chapter focuses on the author's experiences teaching, researching, and moving between different spaces in Education City, Doha, as it developed and changed during the period of the author's fieldwork. It looks at how Qatar Foundation responded to criticisms, primarily from segments of the citizenry that felt left out of knowledge economy development, through the development of Hamad bin Khalifa University (HBKU). HBKU's formation reconfigure…
Beyond Exception
Over nearly two decades during which they have each been conducting fieldwork in the Arabian Peninsula, the authors have regularly encountered exoticizing and exceptionalist discourses about the region and its people, political systems, and prevalent cultural practices. These persistent encounters became the springboard for the book, a reflection on conducting fieldwork within a “field” that is marked by such representations. The book's focus is …
Introduction
Contestations of Imperial Citizenship
Texas A&M, a public land grant university in College Station, Texas, has a long history of engagement with the Bush family. These ties highlight the university's entanglement with US imperial enterprises, which extend into the Persian Gulf. George H. W. Bush's own explanation of why he decided to place his presidential library at the campus despite not attending Texas A&M focused on these connections: “Over the years, Aggies have provided great s…
Beyond Exception
Islamophobia and the uneven legal geographies of ethnonationalism
Laboratories of Liberalism
Diaspora
Diaspora within anthropology and related disciplines has become a common way to think about identity and community formation that occurs through the process of migration and the ongoing linkages (both material and affective) between a real or imagined “homeland” and the various locations of resettlement. The concept of diaspora has allowed scholars to move beyond traditional approaches to migration, which have focused mainly on economic push–pull…
Team-teaching as Feminist Praxis at a Small Liberal Arts College
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Teach for Arabia
Teach for Arabia offers an ethnographic account of the experiences of students, faculty, and administrators in Education City, Qatar. Education City, home to the branch campuses of six elite American universities, represents the Qatari government's multibillion dollar investment over the last two decades in growing a local knowledge-based economy. Though leaders have eagerly welcomed these institutions, not all citizens embrace the U.S. universit…
Stateless in the Gulf
Bidun—people without papers or nationality—make up almost 10 per cent of the Kuwaiti national population, but are culturally and linguistically relatively indistinguishable from citizens (p. 1). They do, however, work in low-wage and low-skilled jobs that most citizens would not and often live in impoverished conditions on the outskirts of the city. In Stateless in the Gulf, Beaugrand traces the story of their origin through nation formation, urb…
A Society of Young Women
There is perhaps no group of people so ubiquitous and yet so silenced in Western academic scholarship about gender in the Middle East as Saudi women. They symbolize for the Western imagination the most oppressed women in the world, as well as a country that, though a political and economic ally of North America and Europe, is supposedly their antithesis. In particular, the intense gender segregation that Saudi Arabia imposes, the ban on women dri…
Everyday Inclusions
Scholarship on Gulf Cooperative Council ( GCC ) states, which have the highest proportions of migrants in the world, usually explores how they are unique in their patterns of non‐citizen exclusion. However, state discourses, geographies, and the heterogeneity of migration to the Gulf share similar traits with contemporary nations and states. Non‐citizens are, as they are everywhere, active participants in Gulf state‐ and nation‐building projects.…
Is the University Universal? Mobile (Re)Constitutions of American Academia in the Gulf Arab States
Through ethnographic examples of students' engagement with American universities in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, I argue that branch campuses have a particularly important relationship with emerging forms of racial consciousness, identity, and politicization among students, both citizen and foreign resident. This entry point is one that deliberately foregrounds the parochialism of an American perspective on the future of the academy as par…
Between global citizenship and Qatarization
Over the last decade, the Gulf state of Qatar has invested billions of dollars in American branch campuses as part of its development as a 'knowledge-based economy'. A knowledge economy will allow Qatar to diversify from petroleum wealth and reduce the country's reliance on foreign labour by introducing more citizens into the workforce, a process called 'Qatarization'. While intended to bolster nativism, branch campuses are organized around certa…
Impossible Citizens
Indian communities have existed in the Gulf emirate of Dubai for more than a century. Since the 1970s, workers from South Asia have flooded into the emirate, enabling Dubai's huge construction boom. They now compose its largest noncitizen population. Though many migrant families are middle-class and second-, third-, or even fourth-generation residents, Indians cannot become legal citizens of the United Arab Emirates. Instead, they are all classif…
Everyday Life in the Spectacular City
Beyond Exception
Over nearly two decades during which they have each been conducting fieldwork in the Arabian Peninsula, the authors have regularly encountered exoticizing and exceptionalist discourses about the region and its people, political systems, and prevalent cultural practices. These persistent encounters became the springboard for the book, a reflection on conducting fieldwork within a “field” that is marked by such representations. The book's focus is …
Everyday Inclusions
Scholarship on Gulf Cooperative Council ( GCC ) states, which have the highest proportions of migrants in the world, usually explores how they are unique in their patterns of non‐citizen exclusion. However, state discourses, geographies, and the heterogeneity of migration to the Gulf share similar traits with contemporary nations and states. Non‐citizens are, as they are everywhere, active participants in Gulf state‐ and nation‐building projects.…
From Golden Frontier to Global City
In this article, I consider how the Dubai government's shift in economic focus from maritime trade networks toward large-scale, Western-style multinational development projects threatened the forms of belonging that Indian merchants had carved out in the emirate during and after British colonialism in the region, and before the liberalization of India's economy, even as Indian merchants were to some extent participants in the production of Dubai …
Producing Diasporas and Globalization
Through ethnographic examples, I explore two modes of diasporic subjectivity that I observed among middle-class Indian migrants in Dubai-racial consciousness and consumer citizenship. However, I argue that the alignment of academic and diasporic informants' understandings of mutually exclusive domains such as culture, nation, economy, and state lead to the relative invisibility of this large population in most literature on South Asian diasporas,…
The 2022 World Cup and Migrants' Rights in Qatar
Since winning the bid to host the 2022 World Cup, the Qatari government has channelled billions of dollars into infrastructural development to prepare for the tournament, which has ramped up the country's already high reliance on migrant labour. The international spotlight on migrant labour abuse has also become more intense as the date of the event approaches. Yet, human rights discourses surrounding World Cup 2022 continue to paint a simplistic…
Between global citizenship and Qatarization
Over the last decade, the Gulf state of Qatar has invested billions of dollars in American branch campuses as part of its development as a 'knowledge-based economy'. A knowledge economy will allow Qatar to diversify from petroleum wealth and reduce the country's reliance on foreign labour by introducing more citizens into the workforce, a process called 'Qatarization'. While intended to bolster nativism, branch campuses are organized around certa…
Laboratories of Liberalism
Is the University Universal? Mobile (Re)Constitutions of American Academia in the Gulf Arab States
Through ethnographic examples of students' engagement with American universities in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, I argue that branch campuses have a particularly important relationship with emerging forms of racial consciousness, identity, and politicization among students, both citizen and foreign resident. This entry point is one that deliberately foregrounds the parochialism of an American perspective on the future of the academy as par…
Critical University Studies
In this article, we explore critical university studies (CUS), an interdisciplinary body of scholarship that interrogates structures of higher education and their entanglements with national and global institutions and political movements. Favoring an expansive definition of CUS, we draw from scholars who trace the origins of the American university to the slave trade, racial science, and Native American ethnic cleansing projects, as well as scho…
Unofficial Citizens
Building upon theories of the state as an “effect” of multiple, sometimes contradictory practices and narratives, I argue that Indian business elites in Dubai play an important role in both bounding the state as distinct from the economy and legitimizing its power. I focus, therefore, on the forms of citizenship and subjectivity that are being produced in Dubai and how the legitimacy of the state relies not just on the recruitment of citizen subj…
Free speech and civil discourse
This article examines the production of belonging and exclusion on a popularEnglish-language blog in theUnitedArabEmirates. TheUAE, and particularly the emirate ofDubai, has a large majority foreign resident population, which has little to no access to official citizenship. However, I argue that foreign residents narrate and perform belonging on various scales, including through the production of on-line 'publics'. As I explore in this article, t…
Beyond Exception
Anatomy of an Article
In this article, we provide an unprecedented insider view of the peer‐review process. Specifically, we highlight how an author (Vora) revised a manuscript submitted to American Anthropologist in a manner that resulted in its eventual publication in the journal. This included responding in various revisions of the manuscript to comments from the editor (Boellstorff), as well as a reviewer who has agreed to reveal her identity (Karen Ho). By showin…
New Cartographies of Belonging and Exclusion in the United Arab Emirates
This article explores how recent policies of inclusion and exclusion in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) might be impacting South Asian diasporic communities and decision-making around immigration. We focus on the ‘Golden Visa’, which allows middle-class and elite immigrants in the UAE access to semi-permanence and a way around the entrenched kafala system of temporary migrant sponsorship. We consider how the Gulf migration regime is influenced by …
Contestations of Imperial Citizenship
Texas A&M, a public land grant university in College Station, Texas, has a long history of engagement with the Bush family. These ties highlight the university's entanglement with US imperial enterprises, which extend into the Persian Gulf. George H. W. Bush's own explanation of why he decided to place his presidential library at the campus despite not attending Texas A&M focused on these connections: “Over the years, Aggies have provided great s…
Islamophobia and the uneven legal geographies of ethnonationalism
Producing Diasporas and Globalization
Through ethnographic examples, I explore two modes of diasporic subjectivity that I observed among middle-class Indian migrants in Dubai-racial consciousness and consumer citizenship. However, I argue that the alignment of academic and diasporic informants' understandings of mutually exclusive domains such as culture, nation, economy, and state lead to the relative invisibility of this large population in most literature on South Asian diasporas,…
American Anthropologist Behind the Scenes
Women in Civil Society
Book Review| March 01 2010 Women in Civil Society: The State, Islamism, and Networks in the UAE by Wanda Krause Women in Civil Society: The State, Islamism, and Networks in the UAE, Krause, Wanda. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Pp. vii, 264. ISBN 0-230-60956-3. Neha Vora Neha Vora Texas A&M University Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of Middle East Women's Studies (2010) 6 (1): 131–134. https://doi.org/10.29…
Unofficial Citizens
Building upon theories of the state as an “effect” of multiple, sometimes contradictory practices and narratives, I argue that Indian business elites in Dubai play an important role in both bounding the state as distinct from the economy and legitimizing its power. I focus, therefore, on the forms of citizenship and subjectivity that are being produced in Dubai and how the legitimacy of the state relies not just on the recruitment of citizen subj…
From Golden Frontier to Global City
In this article, I consider how the Dubai government's shift in economic focus from maritime trade networks toward large-scale, Western-style multinational development projects threatened the forms of belonging that Indian merchants had carved out in the emirate during and after British colonialism in the region, and before the liberalization of India's economy, even as Indian merchants were to some extent participants in the production of Dubai …
Anatomy of an Article
In this article, we provide an unprecedented insider view of the peer‐review process. Specifically, we highlight how an author (Vora) revised a manuscript submitted to American Anthropologist in a manner that resulted in its eventual publication in the journal. This included responding in various revisions of the manuscript to comments from the editor (Boellstorff), as well as a reviewer who has agreed to reveal her identity (Karen Ho). By showin…
Free speech and civil discourse
This article examines the production of belonging and exclusion on a popularEnglish-language blog in theUnitedArabEmirates. TheUAE, and particularly the emirate ofDubai, has a large majority foreign resident population, which has little to no access to official citizenship. However, I argue that foreign residents narrate and perform belonging on various scales, including through the production of on-line 'publics'. As I explore in this article, t…
Impossible Citizens
Indian communities have existed in the Gulf emirate of Dubai for more than a century. Since the 1970s, workers from South Asia have flooded into the emirate, enabling Dubai's huge construction boom. They now compose its largest noncitizen population. Though many migrant families are middle-class and second-, third-, or even fourth-generation residents, Indians cannot become legal citizens of the United Arab Emirates. Instead, they are all classif…
Impossible Citizens
Indian communities have existed in the Gulf emirate of Dubai for more than a century. Since the 1970s, workers from South Asia have flooded into the emirate, enabling Dubai's huge construction boom. They now compose its largest noncitizen population. Though many migrant families are middle-class and second-, third-, or even fourth-generation residents, Indians cannot become legal citizens of the United Arab Emirates. Instead, they are all classif…
Between global citizenship and Qatarization
Over the last decade, the Gulf state of Qatar has invested billions of dollars in American branch campuses as part of its development as a 'knowledge-based economy'. A knowledge economy will allow Qatar to diversify from petroleum wealth and reduce the country's reliance on foreign labour by introducing more citizens into the workforce, a process called 'Qatarization'. While intended to bolster nativism, branch campuses are organized around certa…
A Society of Young Women
There is perhaps no group of people so ubiquitous and yet so silenced in Western academic scholarship about gender in the Middle East as Saudi women. They symbolize for the Western imagination the most oppressed women in the world, as well as a country that, though a political and economic ally of North America and Europe, is supposedly their antithesis. In particular, the intense gender segregation that Saudi Arabia imposes, the ban on women dri…
Everyday Inclusions
Scholarship on Gulf Cooperative Council ( GCC ) states, which have the highest proportions of migrants in the world, usually explores how they are unique in their patterns of non‐citizen exclusion. However, state discourses, geographies, and the heterogeneity of migration to the Gulf share similar traits with contemporary nations and states. Non‐citizens are, as they are everywhere, active participants in Gulf state‐ and nation‐building projects.…
Is the University Universal? Mobile (Re)Constitutions of American Academia in the Gulf Arab States
Through ethnographic examples of students' engagement with American universities in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, I argue that branch campuses have a particularly important relationship with emerging forms of racial consciousness, identity, and politicization among students, both citizen and foreign resident. This entry point is one that deliberately foregrounds the parochialism of an American perspective on the future of the academy as par…
Diaspora
Diaspora within anthropology and related disciplines has become a common way to think about identity and community formation that occurs through the process of migration and the ongoing linkages (both material and affective) between a real or imagined “homeland” and the various locations of resettlement. The concept of diaspora has allowed scholars to move beyond traditional approaches to migration, which have focused mainly on economic push–pull…
Team-teaching as Feminist Praxis at a Small Liberal Arts College
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Teach for Arabia
Teach for Arabia offers an ethnographic account of the experiences of students, faculty, and administrators in Education City, Qatar. Education City, home to the branch campuses of six elite American universities, represents the Qatari government's multibillion dollar investment over the last two decades in growing a local knowledge-based economy. Though leaders have eagerly welcomed these institutions, not all citizens embrace the U.S. universit…
Stateless in the Gulf
Bidun—people without papers or nationality—make up almost 10 per cent of the Kuwaiti national population, but are culturally and linguistically relatively indistinguishable from citizens (p. 1). They do, however, work in low-wage and low-skilled jobs that most citizens would not and often live in impoverished conditions on the outskirts of the city. In Stateless in the Gulf, Beaugrand traces the story of their origin through nation formation, urb…
Laboratories of Liberalism
Space, Mobility, and Shifting Identities in the Constitution of the “Field”
This chapter reflects on the experiences of the authors during a combined three decades of research in Dubai, Doha, and Riyadh, highlighting their shifting and contingent subject positions as they moved through urban spaces in the Arabian Peninsula and interacted with various interlocutors during their dissertation research. It examines how prevalent ideas about identity in North American and European societies, which have heavily influenced post…
Conclusion
This concluding chapter explores the question of what decolonized ethnography and academia can look like. It argues that de-exceptionalizing the Arabian Peninsula as a field site requires deconstructing an idealized vision of Western academia as a presumed site of democracy and liberalism. The projects of anthropology and sociology, as they have been invested in anticolonial and antiracist justice and breaking down binary understandings between E…
Anthropology and the Educational Encounter
This chapter focuses on the author's experiences teaching, researching, and moving between different spaces in Education City, Doha, as it developed and changed during the period of the author's fieldwork. It looks at how Qatar Foundation responded to criticisms, primarily from segments of the citizenry that felt left out of knowledge economy development, through the development of Hamad bin Khalifa University (HBKU). HBKU's formation reconfigure…
Beyond Exception
Over nearly two decades during which they have each been conducting fieldwork in the Arabian Peninsula, the authors have regularly encountered exoticizing and exceptionalist discourses about the region and its people, political systems, and prevalent cultural practices. These persistent encounters became the springboard for the book, a reflection on conducting fieldwork within a “field” that is marked by such representations. The book's focus is …
Introduction
Contestations of Imperial Citizenship
Texas A&M, a public land grant university in College Station, Texas, has a long history of engagement with the Bush family. These ties highlight the university's entanglement with US imperial enterprises, which extend into the Persian Gulf. George H. W. Bush's own explanation of why he decided to place his presidential library at the campus despite not attending Texas A&M focused on these connections: “Over the years, Aggies have provided great s…
Beyond Exception
Political science (27 obras) · Sociology (25 obras) · Law (22 obras) · Politics (17 obras) · Law (15 obras) · Gender Studies (13 obras) · Socioeconomic Development in MENA (11 obras) · Anthropology (8 obras) · Citizenship (8 obras) · Middle East and Rwanda Conflicts (8 obras)