Arrivals, Detours, Departures: The Dubai Muslim Experience In this talk, I reflect upon the main insights and persisting questions that animate my in-progress book manuscript, Dubai Detours: Being Muslim after the Arab Spring. An ethnography of Islam in the modern Gulf, Dubai Detours uses ethnographic research and interviews conducted between 2016 and 2024 to reflect upon the forms of politics and piety possible in the contemporary United Arab Emirates (UAE). Centered around the life stories of five Muslim women living in Dubai, it explores how economic and political conditions shape the ways Muslims relate to God and, through God, to others. By analyzing divine-human relations, it gets at a range of debates around what it is to be human – on subjectivity and identity, freedom and agency, relationality and belonging. To the growing field of anthropological studies of the Gulf, Dubai Detours contributes an ethnography which studies not elite citizens, subaltern migrants, or diasporic communities, but individuals and collectives composed of educated, middle-class women of diverse ethnonational backgrounds. It is also one of the first ethnographies of the region to make religion its key focal point, and the only one that brings the UAE into the fold of scholarly conversations about the Arab Spring. Dubai Detours also makes a range of theoretical interventions important to scholars of Islam, anthropology, and the Middle East at large. Its chapters trouble oft-presumed distinctions between the Islamic and the liberal, the religious and the secular; underscore the relational aspects of subjectivity; trace how God mediates relations between people and the state; and offer a rich portrait of religiosity in the post-Arab Spring Middle East.Dr Joud Alkorani Holding an MA and PhD from the University of Toronto, Joud Alkorani is an anthropologist with a background in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies. Joud's research explores how migrants’ everyday lives and religious practices take shape in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. Her research and teaching engage themes like migration and transnationalism; statehood and governmentality; relationality and subjectivity; and lived theology. Mar 14 2025 15.00 - 16.30 Arrivals, Detours, Departures: The Dubai Muslim Experience A special public seminar featuring Dr Joud Al Korani (Radbound University). Room 2.11 (second floor) Appleton Tower 11 Crichton Street Edinburgh EH8 9LE Find Venue Register Free
Arrivals, Detours, Departures: The Dubai Muslim Experience In this talk, I reflect upon the main insights and persisting questions that animate my in-progress book manuscript, Dubai Detours: Being Muslim after the Arab Spring. An ethnography of Islam in the modern Gulf, Dubai Detours uses ethnographic research and interviews conducted between 2016 and 2024 to reflect upon the forms of politics and piety possible in the contemporary United Arab Emirates (UAE). Centered around the life stories of five Muslim women living in Dubai, it explores how economic and political conditions shape the ways Muslims relate to God and, through God, to others. By analyzing divine-human relations, it gets at a range of debates around what it is to be human – on subjectivity and identity, freedom and agency, relationality and belonging. To the growing field of anthropological studies of the Gulf, Dubai Detours contributes an ethnography which studies not elite citizens, subaltern migrants, or diasporic communities, but individuals and collectives composed of educated, middle-class women of diverse ethnonational backgrounds. It is also one of the first ethnographies of the region to make religion its key focal point, and the only one that brings the UAE into the fold of scholarly conversations about the Arab Spring. Dubai Detours also makes a range of theoretical interventions important to scholars of Islam, anthropology, and the Middle East at large. Its chapters trouble oft-presumed distinctions between the Islamic and the liberal, the religious and the secular; underscore the relational aspects of subjectivity; trace how God mediates relations between people and the state; and offer a rich portrait of religiosity in the post-Arab Spring Middle East.Dr Joud Alkorani Holding an MA and PhD from the University of Toronto, Joud Alkorani is an anthropologist with a background in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies. Joud's research explores how migrants’ everyday lives and religious practices take shape in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. Her research and teaching engage themes like migration and transnationalism; statehood and governmentality; relationality and subjectivity; and lived theology. Mar 14 2025 15.00 - 16.30 Arrivals, Detours, Departures: The Dubai Muslim Experience A special public seminar featuring Dr Joud Al Korani (Radbound University). Room 2.11 (second floor) Appleton Tower 11 Crichton Street Edinburgh EH8 9LE Find Venue Register Free
Mar 14 2025 15.00 - 16.30 Arrivals, Detours, Departures: The Dubai Muslim Experience A special public seminar featuring Dr Joud Al Korani (Radbound University).
