Faculty Directory

Alvard, Michael Athreya, Sheela Bryant, Vaughn Busdiecker, Sara Carlson, David Carlson, Debbie Castor, Nicole Castro, Filipe Crisman, Kevin Dannhaeuser, Norbert de Ruiter, Darryl Dickson, D.Bruce Eckert, Suzanne Goebel, Ted Green, Tom Grider, Sylvia Gursky-Doyen, Sharon Hamilton, Donny Pulak, Cemal Smith, Wayne Thoms, Alston Vora, Neha Wachsmann, Shelley Waters, Mike Werner, Cynthia Winking, Jeff Wright, Lori

Neha Vora Assistant Professor nvora@tamu.edu LEGG 021 Vita Teaching Research Publications Showcase Committees Interests:  neoliberalism; states; South Asian diasporas; migration; transnationalism; the Gulf Arab States; feminist theory; gender and ethnicity; globalized higher education; citizenship and belonging; Indian Ocean connectivities Neha Vora is a sociocultural anthropologist whose work focuses on the dynamics of race, class, gender, and citizenship in the Gulf Arab States and among South Asian immigrant populations. She holds joint appointment in the Department of Anthropology and the Women’s Studies Program. Dr. Vora’s current manuscript, titled “Participatory Exclusion: The Emirati State, Forms of Belonging, and Dubai’s Indian Middle-Class,” investigates the effects of Dubai’s aggressive post-oil development strategy, which relies upon foreign investment and labor while denying migrant belonging. As citizens become a diminishing minority, the UAE state is increasingly interested in policing the boundaries of national identity, and state discourses often stress that foreigners are not migrants but temporary “guest workers.” Vora, through detailed ethnographic observations and interviews, demonstrates that Indians, despite having no access to formal citizenship, actually experience Dubai as an extension of India. However, middle-class Indians are also integral to the legitimacy of the Emirati state and participate in reifying the division between citizen and foreigner in the UAE. While structural inequality is often thought to be the result of state-sanctioned exploitation of migrant laborers, Vora argues that it is actually maintained through the convergence of expatriate and governmental conceptual vocabularies, which both consider economy, culture, and nation as distinct bounded domains to which only certain populations have access. Dr. Vora’s next research project will focus on the influx of American institutions of higher learning into the Gulf Arab States, including (Texas A&M!). She is interested in exploring this topic from a macro and micro perspective. First, she will consider the bureaucratic, economic, and state entanglements and negotiations that go into the implementation of branches of US-accredited universities in the Gulf. What have been the successes and failures to date, and what are the intentions and goals of those involved in the planning process? Second, she will consider the individual experiences of students and faculty at these universities and how American, Gulf, and other cultural logics surrounding gender, national identity, citizenship, Islam, and academic freedom come into contact—and are renegotiated—in these spaces.