The Messy Middle

(Under Contract with Columbia University Press)

What does it mean to move to a city that you are likely to leave soon? To form friendships that you know are temporary? To make a home that is at once both a place of belonging and a transient dwelling? These are the questions facing many middle class migrants who move to Dubai, an emergent global city, that holds promise of the “good life” for their families yet no path to citizenship or permanent residency. Mainstream media and academic accounts of migrant life in Dubai often highlight the anxiety of impermanence and the precarity of working conditions. However, what is less understood is how some migrants embrace impermanence as a resource.

Challenging the sedantrist bias in mainstream migration accounts, this book examines the ways that middle class serial migrant mothers attempt to increase the possibility of future movement with their families along alternative pathways. Moving away from the challenges of assimilation or incorporation, this book focuses on the ways in which repeated border crossing fosters a subjectivity of permanent temporariness and offers new possibilities for upward mobility that go beyond the constraints of the singular nation state.