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RGS‐IBG Book Series

For further information about the series and a full list of published and forthcoming titles please visit www.rgsbookseries.com

Published

Transnational Geographies of the Heart: Intimate Subjectivities in a Globalising City
Katie Walsh

Cryptic Concrete: A Subterranean Journey Into Cold War Germany
Ian Klinke

Work‐Life Advantage: Sustaining Regional Learning and Innovation
Al James

Pathological Lives: Disease, Space and Biopolitics
Steve Hinchliffe, Nick Bingham, John Allen and Simon Carter

Smoking Geographies: Space, Place and Tobacco
Ross Barnett, Graham Moon, Jamie Pearce, Lee Thompson and Liz Twigg

Rehearsing the State: The Political Practices of the Tibetan Government‐in‐Exile
Fiona McConnell

Nothing Personal? Geographies of Governing and Activism in the British Asylum System
Nick Gill

Articulations of Capital: Global Production Networks and Regional Transformations
John Pickles and Adrian Smith, with Robert Begg, Milan Bucˇek, Poli Roukova and Rudolf Pástor

Metropolitan Preoccupations: The Spatial Politics of Squatting in Berlin
Alexander Vasudevan

Everyday Peace? Politics, Citizenship and Muslim Lives in India
Philippa Williams

Assembling Export Markets: The Making and Unmaking of Global Food Connections in West Africa
Stefan Ouma

Africa’s Information Revolution: Technical Regimes and Production Networks in South Africa and Tanzania
James T. Murphy and Pádraig Carmody

Origination: The Geographies of Brands and Branding
Andy Pike

In the Nature of Landscape: Cultural Geography on the Norfolk Broads
David Matless

Geopolitics and Expertise: Knowledge and Authority in European Diplomacy
Merje Kuus

Everyday Moral Economies: Food, Politics and Scale in Cuba
Marisa Wilson

Material Politics: Disputes Along the Pipeline
Andrew Barry

Fashioning Globalisation: New Zealand Design, Working Women and the Cultural Economy
Maureen Molloy and Wendy Larner

Working Lives – Gender, Migration and Employment in Britain, 1945–2007
Linda McDowell

Dunes: Dynamics, Morphology and Geological History
Andrew Warren

Spatial Politics: Essays for Doreen Massey
Edited by David Featherstone and Joe Painter

The Improvised State: Sovereignty, Performance and Agency in Dayton Bosnia
Alex Jeffrey

Learning the City: Knowledge and Translocal Assemblage
Colin McFarlane

Globalizing Responsibility: The Political Rationalities of Ethical Consumption
Clive Barnett, Paul Cloke, Nick Clarke and Alice Malpass

Domesticating Neo‐Liberalism: Spaces of Economic Practice and Social Reproduction in Post‐Socialist Cities
Alison Stenning, Adrian Smith, Alena Rochovská and Dariusz świątek

Swept Up Lives? Re‐envisioning the Homeless City
Paul Cloke, Jon May and Sarah Johnsen

Aerial Life: Spaces, Mobilities, Affects
Peter Adey

Millionaire Migrants: Trans‐Pacific Life Lines
David Ley

State, Science and the Skies: Governmentalities of the British Atmosphere
Mark Whitehead

Complex Locations: Women’s Geographical Work in the UK 1850–1970
Avril Maddrell

Value Chain Struggles: Institutions and Governance in the Plantation Districts of South India
Jeff Neilson and Bill Pritchard

Queer Visibilities: Space, Identity and Interaction in Cape Town
Andrew Tucker

Arsenic Pollution: A Global Synthesis
Peter Ravenscroft, Hugh Brammer and Keith Richards

Resistance, Space and Political Identities: The Making of Counter‐Global Networks
David Featherstone

Mental Health and Social Space: Towards Inclusionary Geographies?
Hester Parr

Climate and Society in Colonial Mexico: A Study in Vulnerability
Georgina H. Endfield

Geochemical Sediments and Landscapes
Edited by David J. Nash and Sue J. McLaren

Driving Spaces: A Cultural‐Historical Geography of England’s M1 Motorway
Peter Merriman

Badlands of the Republic: Space, Politics and Urban Policy
Mustafa Dikeç

Geomorphology of Upland Peat: Erosion, Form and Landscape Change
Martin Evans and Jeff Warburton

Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities
Stephen Legg

People/States/Territories
Rhys Jones

Publics and the City
Kurt Iveson

After the Three Italies: Wealth, Inequality and Industrial Change
Mick Dunford and Lidia Greco

Putting Workfare in Place
Peter Sunley, Ron Martin and Corinne Nativel

Domicile and Diaspora
Alison Blunt

Geographies and Moralities
Edited by Roger Lee and David M. Smith

Military Geographies
Rachel Woodward

A New Deal for Transport?
Edited by Iain Docherty and Jon Shaw

Geographies of British Modernity
Edited by David Gilbert, David Matless and Brian Short

Lost Geographies of Power
John Allen

Globalising South China
Carolyn L. Cartier

Geomorphological Processes and Landscape Change: Britain in the Last 1000 Years
Edited by David L. Higgitt and E. Mark Lee

Transnational Geographies of the Heart

Intimate Subjectivities in a Globalising City

 

 

 

Katie Walsh

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Series Editor’s Preface

The RGS‐IBG Book Series only publishes work of the highest international standing. Its emphasis is on distinctive new developments in human and physical geography, although it is also open to contributions from cognate disciplines whose interests overlap with those of geographers. The Series places strong emphasis on theoretically informed and empirically strong texts. Reflecting the vibrant and diverse theoretical and empirical agendas that characterise the contemporary discipline, contributions are expected to inform, challenge and stimulate the reader. Overall, the RGS‐IBG Book Series seeks to promote scholarly publications that leave an intellectual mark and change the way readers think about particular issues, methods or theories.

For details on how to submit a proposal please visit:

www.rgsbookseries.com

David Featherstone
University of Glasgow, UK

RGS‐IBG Book Series Editor

Acknowledgements

The original research on which this book is based was funded by an ESRC Postgraduate Training Studentship (R42200134499).

I am enormously thankful to all the people in Dubai who shared their insights and everyday lives with me as interviewees in the research. I cannot thank you individually, unfortunately, or I would risk your anonymity. I hope that I have done enough to demonstrate both the diversity of perspectives and experiences I encountered, as well as the vulnerabilities of British residents in Dubai individually and collectively. In this book, I have tried to locate myself, however temporarily, as part of your community, not least because I felt a strong sense of belonging to this moment in Dubai, among you, and I am enormously grateful for the friendships I experienced, many of which were life‐transforming.

The idea for the ethnographic research on which this book is based emerged during my year as an MA student (2000–2001) on the Cultural Geography (Research) PGT programme at Royal Holloway, University of London. I am indebted to the intellectual environment I encountered there, especially to Philip Crang who supervised my PhD, Katie Willis who mentored my postdoctoral year, and Catherine Nash and David Gilbert who inspired and supported me at various points during my MA year and beyond. I am also thankful to Alison Blunt and Philip Jackson whose feedback on my fieldwork as examiners gave me the confidence to highlight my contribution all these years later. While studying at RHUL I also had the great fortune to be supported by the friendship of fellow students, especially Becky Fox, Fernando Garcia and Hilary Geoghegan. My mother and father deserve special mention, too, not least for providing a ‘boomerang’ home for me in the last few months of writing up my research and again before I started teaching at Sussex.

This book is also a product of reflection in the decade following my PhD. Meeting and collaborating with other people writing on migration and/or British migrants has been especially rewarding and the insights of Anne‐Meike Fechter, Anne Coles, Pauline Leonard and Karen O’Reilly have been especially helpful. I am lucky also to have worked for ten years in the Department of Geography at University of Sussex and in affiliation with the Sussex Centre for Migration Research. Here I have had the privilege of learning both from those who have already shaped the field of Migration Studies – especially Russell King – as well as from doctoral students I have had the delight to co‐supervise and whose work has shaped my own. I have appreciated collegial support and encouragement from many others at Sussex and I am especially grateful to those who collaborated with running field classes to Dubai during which my enthusiasm for this monograph was re‐booted.

This book draws upon empirical material I have previously published in the following articles and book chapters (Coles & Walsh 2010; Walsh 2006a, 2006b, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012).