Homing in perpetual foreignness: non-citizens as ‘hosts’ of global mega event in Dubai

This research explores temporary migrants’ practices of homing in public space against the backdrop of perpetual foreignness. Drawing on 32 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, this paper examines how migrants foster a sense of ‘home’ despite their guestworker status. I focus on the ways some migrants – often from middle-class backgrounds, with greater room to maneuver in their daily lives – navigate shifting boundaries of inclusion and exclusion at a global mega event, by assuming roles as volunteer ‘hosts’ alongside Emirati volunteers to present Dubai to a global audience. Through their daily interactions with other migrants, nationals, and tourists, I analyse the homing practices through which they negotiate belonging, while also encountering the boundaries that delimit it inside and outside the event grounds. Such global spectacles function as exceptional spaces, providing a liminal opening from restrictive state policies and revealing the complex narratives of migrants’ (non)belonging. By situating migrants’ homing within this exceptional public space, this paper illuminates the layered ways by which temporary migrants negotiate their roles as both ‘guests’ and ‘hosts’ in stratified urban contexts.