Andrew Gardner Co-edits Book on Migrant Stories From the Margins of Society

TACOMA, Wash. – Migrants who become the “invisible” laborers in the oil-rich Middle East tell their personal stories in a new e-book co-edited by Andrew Gardner, an anthropologist at University of Puget Sound. Constructing Qatar: Migrant Narratives from the Margins of the Global System illuminates the experiences and perspectives of individuals who endure a difficult life, with few rights or freedoms, in a foreign place in order to support families back home.

The 18 personal narratives in the book were crafted by six student researchers from Qatar University, Weill-Cornell Medical College in Qatar, and Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar. The students worked for two years with Gardner and co-editor Autumn Watts, a lecturer at Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar

“This book is a product of those students’ work: they interviewed labor migrants, spent time immersed in their world, learned about their homes in Asia and Africa, and crafted these stories as a result,” Gardner explained on the Puget Sound Department of Comparative Sociology blog.

Every year tens of thousands of men and women from South Asia, Africa, and other parts of the world journey to Qatar and the other petroleum-rich states of the Arabian Peninsula to work. They take jobs as construction workers, drivers, servants, accountants, shopkeepers, custodians, and laborers, sometimes bound by onerous work contracts and unable to leave because their passports are confiscated.

Constructing Qatar tells these people’s stories as they migrate from their homes in Nepal, India, Sri Lanka, or elsewhere and portrays their lives in the labor camps in Doha, Qatar. The stories resulted from multiple interviews by student researchers Elma Atic, Nora Biary, Zaid Haque, Elizabeth Jose, Yogamaya Mantha, and Marwa Saleh. Portrait photographs were taken by Kristin Giordano, and a second photo essay of images was produced by the labor migrants themselves.

The electronic version of the book costs $2.99 and is available on Amazon, Smashwords, and other platforms. All profits from the sale of the volume will be distributed to organizations that support outreach and assist migrant workers in Qatar.

Andrew Gardner is a sociocultural anthropologist and the author of City of Strangers: Gulf Migration and the Indian Community in Bahrain (2010, Cornell University Press). An associate professor in the Department of Comparative Sociology, he is currently focusing his work and scholarship in the Gulf States of the Arabian Peninsula and exploring transnational labor. He also maintains an interest in environmental anthropology and the political ecology of both rural and urban peoples of the Arabian Peninsula.

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