My research interests center around the fields of international migration, culture, race/ethnicity, inequality, qualitative methods, and belonging. Taking an intersectional approach in examining the case of Dubai, United Arab Emirates, I am interested in understanding the everyday practices of belonging among temporary migrants.
Dissertation
“Performance of Cosmopolitanism: Temporary Migrants and their Sense of Belonging in Dubai”
This project analyzes cosmopolitanism as a social performance that conceals the categorical inequality between temporary migrants and nationals. While recruited primarily for labor, many temporary migrants live and experience the host community as members of varying degrees. Drawing on 32 months of ethnographic research in Dubai, UAE, I show how the temporary migrants perform their everyday belonging despite the systematic inequalities and state policies preventing their settlement. When states paradoxically implement policies of segregation and political projects of tolerance, migrants respond by employing cosmopolitan narratives to perform their sense of belonging. In this framework, cosmopolitanism addresses the tension between exclusion and emancipation – a context employed by the migrants to build their homes in the legal, social, and temporal sense to feel that they belong to Dubai. Social tensions and segregation notwithstanding, this performance allows the residents – both the nationals and non-nationals alike – to engage with one another in a spirit of civility to interactionally resolve the contradiction of policies. This work underlines the hierarchical inequality that pervades along class, gender, age, national, and racial lines not only between nationals and non-nationals, but also among and within nationals and non-nationals, and the performance of cosmopolitanism that enables a successful coexistence of these groups. In doing so, this study takes an in-depth and often personal look at the everyday lives of temporary migrants, nationals, and even tourists, and their corresponding performances to demonstrate their belonging in relation to the other groups.
*2023 Gwenn Okruhlik Dissertation Award, Association for Gulf and Arabian Peninsula Studies (AGAPS)
Peer-Reviewed Publication
Kwon, Hee Eun. 2022. “Backfire Effect: Using Hegemony to Explore Our Own Positionality”. TRAILS: Teaching Resources and Innovations Library for Sociology, July. Washington DC: American Sociological Association. https://trails.asanet.org/article/view/backfire-effect-using-hegemony.
*2023 Graduate Student Contributions to Teaching and Learning Award, American Sociological Association (ASA) Section on Teaching and Learning in Sociology
Works under Review
Kwon, Hee Eun. “Privileged Pariahs: Wives of Korean Professional Expatriates in the UAE.” [Request]
Work in Progress
Kwon, Hee Eun. “Performance of Cosmopolitanism: Temporary Migrants and their Sense of Belonging in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.” [Request]
Kwon, Hee Eun. “More than a National Dress: the Symbolic Context of Abaya.” [Request]
Kwon, Hee Eun. “On Positionality: Navigating a Male-Dominant Workspace”