Mall of the Emirates / by May Al-Dabbagh

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Dubai, January 9, 2020

Can malls be understood as anything more than bastions of capitalist consumption? We travelled to Mall of the Emirates and walked around to observe the activities that take place in the mall and reflect on our own embodied experience of walking through the different spaces in it. We met with Rana Al-Mutawa who is currently conducing doctoral work on questions of authenticity and urban spaces at Oxford University. Rana shared her research which addresses mainstream descriptions of Gulf cities as “inauthentic” and described her ethnographic work in the city and how it provides a counter narrative to the oversimplification of social experiences of city residents. We reflected on the social construction of authenticity and what it means when we engage in activities in which we consume particular kinds of products understood to be “authentic” (food, fashion, art, etc..). The juxtaposition of the public park and the mall enabled us to engage in self reflexive dialogue about how to go beyond the obvious (park = public vs. mall = private).