In the Shadows of Skyscrapers: Labor Migrants in the Petroleum States of the Arabian Peninsula

While Dr. Gardner’s most recent book, City of Strangers: Gulf Migration and the Indian Community in Bahrain (Cornell 2010), ethnographically explores the migrant and diasporic Indian community in the Kingdom of Bahrain, his larger ongoing research interest is with the experiences of the labor migrants in all the petroleum states of the Arabian Peninsula. Gardner will address this extraordinarily large and understudied migration flow of the lowest echelons of the migrant workforce and examine the patterns and common threads that weave through these migrants’ experiences, and peers from that vantage point at the evolving power of the modern Gulf State. About the Lecturer: Andrew Gardner, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Department of Comparative Sociology, University of Puget Sound, Tacom