0608, 2019

Results & Trends IX: Religious Discrimination in India

By Caroline Osella|August 6, 2019|project outputs, project results and findings, Uncategorized|327 comments

3 periods of Kerala fieldwork over 2 years. 84 respondents. Mixed ages, provenance, community and class, different migration destinations. Special focus on Mavelikkara, Calicut & Mattancherry.  Respondents split by gender.  A mix of retired, returned, current migrants. In the free-flow of participant observation and 84 unstructured interviews, I heard some frightened voices and many despairing ones, when respondents spoke about India. One of the themes that came up in many

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1907, 2019

Results & Trends VIII: gender discrimination in India

By Caroline Osella|July 19, 2019|project outputs, project results and findings, Uncategorized|4 comments

A project always builds on previous work. One of the intriguing findings that had come up in my research over 2015 (funded by Zayed University) was this: while interviewing Malayali respondents, and chatting with long-time Gulf Malayali friends, I began to discern an unexpected discourse. I kept hearing that ‘The Gulf is good for women’. Finding out more about this, and unpicking what ‘good for women’ might mean, was one

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1706, 2019

Who Was Part Of This? Meet The Project Assistants

By Caroline Osella|June 17, 2019|project results and findings, Uncategorized|0 comments

The days are long gone when anthropologists would pretend to be lone heroes.  All that nonsense was part of a colonial moment and also part of a certain hubristic trend in academia. Yet ghastly echoes of an Indiana Jones nature still bedevil the concept of ‘fieldwork‘. Let’s speak plainly here: everything that all of us do is always collaborative, and nothing more so than ethnographic research. My part of the

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1006, 2019

Results & Trends VII: Infrastructure (as predicted)

By Caroline Osella|June 10, 2019|project outputs, project results and findings, Uncategorised, Uncategorized|16 comments

3 periods of Kerala fieldwork over 2 years. 84 respondents. Mixed ages, provenance, community and class, different migration destinations. A straight 50/50 split between those who felt that Gulf migration was “only for the money” and those who felt that lifestyle and other factors were also important in their decision to go and to stay. The next few posts will pull out the major factors which emerged from the 84 free-form

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0806, 2019

Results & Trends VI: Life in the Gulf – good, bad, ambivalent?

By Caroline Osella|June 8, 2019|project outputs, project results and findings, Uncategorised, Uncategorized|0 comments

3 periods of Kerala fieldwork over 2 years. 84 respondents. Mixed ages, provenance, community and class, different migration destinations. Here’s some quotes from interviews in which respondents explained or justified their evaluation of Gulf life as positive, negative or ambivalent and often compared it to life in Kerala. ‘There’s no communal problem in the Gulf. I’m the only Hindu in my team, but we all get on and we never

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0606, 2019

Results & Trends V: Is It All About the Money?

By Caroline Osella|June 6, 2019|project outputs, project results and findings, Uncategorized|0 comments

3 periods of Kerala fieldwork over 2 years. 84 respondents. Mixed ages, provenance, community and class, different migration destinations. Special focus on Mavelikkara, Calicut & Mattancherry   Respondents split by gender         A mix of retired, returned, current migrants Their response to my key question: is Gulf migration only about the money? You’ll be thinking I’ve made this up – such a neat result. Split straight down

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0506, 2019

All Data Is In. We Have Interesting News.

By Caroline Osella|June 5, 2019|project results and findings, Uncategorized|2 comments

I’ve been closing my part of the REALM project over the past month. Now I will be posting highlights from the results. Anyone who works in migration can approach me if they need more details, and you can see the bigger REALM website for details of other projects on this collaborative initiative. My project – ‘The Paradox of the Gulf as a Space of Freedom and Aspiration’, grew out of

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0206, 2019

Another Report on longstanding India-Khaleeji connections

By Caroline Osella|June 2, 2019|Media, project results and findings, Uncategorized|0 comments

I recently posted about some human stories which remind us of the longstanding travel connections between the Gulf and India and about an instagram project gathering images of Gulf Indians. Now I’ve received (thanks to the amazing Ala group) a link to another interesting blogpost tracking these connections. It contains some interview words from Dr Neha Vora, whose book about Dubai Indians challenges narratives of purity and separation. As I

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2805, 2019

Abu Dhabi – God’s Own Country

By Caroline Osella|May 28, 2019|Media, project results and findings, Uncategorized|7 comments

An important question for my part of the REALM research has been about following up on my earlier work, which strongly suggested that Gulf migration, for Malayalis, is not “just about the money”.  I’ve been asking people to identify what other aspects are important to them. Now, UK project assistant Helen Underhill and I have been sifting over 100 free-form qualitative interviews and putting some of our findings into a

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3004, 2019

Putting ‘travel’ back at the heart of migration stories.

By Caroline Osella|April 30, 2019|Media, project results and findings|6 comments

Today I’m re-posting another excellent piece, which mulls over the phenomenonlogy of migration and pleads for us not to forget the human stories and experiences which often get hidden behind a policy-maker’s focus on migration costs, income outcomes, push-pull factors, labyrinthine systems of visas, patrons, travel costs and more. This is why the REALM project gathers not only economists and demographers, but also political scientists, ethnographers and sociologists: and insists

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