An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Dr Nadeen Dakkak (Alwaleed Postdoctoral Fellow 2021-22; University of Warwick)
Navigating the Limits of Hospitality: Temporariness, Gratitude and Loyalty amongst Migrants in Kuwait
The large population of migrants in Kuwait, commonly referred to in official and media discourses as the demographic imbalance between the citizen minority and the non-citizen majority, has been a constant concern. Even though the country’s accommodation of migrants is often framed through narratives of hospitality and benevolence, these have been simultaneously accompanied by persistent attempts to ‘fix’ the demographic imbalance through increasing restrictions on migrants. The limits of hospitality are thus evoked to justify discrimination, but they also reveal the role of gratitude and loyalty as devices by which migrants are expected, or indeed choose, to narrate the hospitality and benevolence of the state and its citizens.
This work-in-progress presentation will reflect on the meanings and functions of gratitude and loyalty when used by migrants to talk about their experiences as non-Kuwaitis in Kuwait. Much has been written about gratitude as a political obligation and the construction of the ‘grateful’, deserving subject in migrant- and refugee-receiving states, but in the context of Kuwait where all migrants have a temporary status and do not become citizens, gratitude and loyalty function differently and are emptied of the promises with which they may be associated elsewhere. My focus is on media responses to a recent law that prevents non-Kuwaitis above the age of 60 from renewing their residency permits. I look at a number of video reports that interview migrants affected by this law to consider ways in which expressions of gratitude and loyalty function as affirmations of exclusionary conceptions of belonging, or as a means for migrants themselves to navigate exclusion and stake claims to Kuwait.
Please click the link below to join the webinar:
https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/81322391722
Passcode: Vr8f3ew2