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The Center for Middle Eastern Studies presents
Rana AlMutawa
Assistant Professor and Emerging Scholar of Social Research and Public Policy, NYU Abu-Dhabi
Everyday Life in the 'Spectacular' City: Making Home in Dubai is an urban ethnography that reveals how middle class-citizens and long-time residents of Dubai interact with the city’s spectacular and so-called "superficial" spaces to create meaningful social lives. It argues that residents adapt themselves to imposed spectacular structures, such as big shopping malls and new developments, while also making these same structures serve their own evolving social needs. By offering an alternative to the discourse of authenticity, elucidating the dynamics of ambivalent belonging, and theorizing adaptive agency, this book belies popular and scholarly stereotypes that portray Dubai’s developments as “inauthentic,” objectively alienating, and inherently disempowering. Moreover, it presents adaptation as a new framework for understanding how contemporary subjects operate beyond the conceptual binary of resistance and capitulation in relating themselves and their communities to the increasingly twinned developments of illiberal society and neoliberal spectacle.
Rana AlMutawa completed her doctoral training at the University of Oxford in 2021. Her thesis, which she is currently working on as a book project, is an urban ethnography of middle-class citizens and long-term residents in Dubai. In particular, she is interested in interrogating the way narratives of certain geographies’ “(in)authenticity” and “superficiality” are often linked to performances of social distinction; in the forms of belonging taking place in “spectacular” spaces that are often dismissed as alienating; and in the intersectional forms of exclusion happening in these settings.
Prior to Oxford, Rana worked as an instructor and researcher at Zayed University in Dubai for three years. As an Emirati woman, she was interested in and wrote about questions on state feminism, national identity and ethnic diversity among Emiratis. She has published her work in Arab Studies Journal (2020); Hawwa (2020); Urban Anthropology (2019); New Middle Eastern Studies (2016) as well as in other public platforms such as the LSE Middle East Studies Blog where she wrote about navigating multiple lived experiences in the Gulf; social distinction, and perceptions of authenticity.
Contact: Liz Flanagan