I am an independent scholar, educator, and curator. My academic research combines social psychology, public policy, and feminist lenses to understand the gendered subjectivities in labor markets in the Gulf Cooperative Council (GCC) region. I attempt to theorize the region from “the ground up” and use my findings to extend and challenge ideas about gender and work in the academy. I pay attention both to “local” forms of essentialism (e.g., patriarchy in the institutions of the family or the state) but also to “global” western-centric essentialisms which obscure important dimensions of social life in non-western sites and populations. This post-colonial feminist approach, which focuses on the interlinkages between the local and the global, does not necessarily see them as diametrically opposed, but rather as mutually constituted and critical to the social mechanisms which shape the subjectivities of social actors in the Gulf and other world regions.
To date, I have worked on a number of research projects that focus on gender, negotiation, and work in the GCC. My projects span a number of different methods (experiments, surveys, and interviews) and include collaborations with both scholars and policy makers based internationally (e.g., Harvard University, Wharton School of Business, University of Maryland, University of Lundt) and locally (e.g., Zayed University, UAE Gender Balance Council, and Ministry of Federal National Council Affairs). My interdisciplinary collaborations reflect my interests in both engaging with scholarly audiences and debates as well as contributing to social change processes in the local communities to which I belong.
Most recently, I was a tenured associate professor at New York University Abu Dhabi where I have taught and conducted research for over a decade. I was involved in co-organizing a roundtable series called Theorizing the Gulf (with John O’Brien and Laure Assaf) and running Haraka: Experimental Lab for Arab Art and Social Thought as a founding faculty member (co-PI) of al Mawrid Arab Center for the Study of Art (with Salwa Mikdadi and Shamoon Zamir).
Currently I am on a functional sabbatical. That’s an expression I made up to mean I am taking stock of what I have done so far to reimagine new possibilities for exciting projects for next year. More updates soon!
To get a more concrete idea about research questions that have interested me:
Read my paper Serial Migrant Mothers and Permanent Temporariness in Dubai published in Migration Studies (2022).
You can see the closing keynote address at the Gender and Work Symposium (HBS) “The Master’s Tools: Exposing, Rejecting, and Appropriating” at Harvard University (2022) and the full projects I discuss in this online Self Tracing Exhibition.