REALM project workshop, Abu Dhabi November 2017.
REALM project workers gathered in Abu Dhabi Nov 14th and 15th to share progress and work towards next steps. We have demographers, economists, geographers, ethnographers, speaking to each other about Gulf migration issues.
What is exciting for me about being in this portfolio of projects are two highly unusual aspects: firstly, that we have a genuinely respectful cross-disciplinary conversation going on, without any of the ‘quantitatives versus qualitatives’ or ‘demographers spurn economists, who sneer at ethnographers, who think themselves superior to geographers’ kind of nonsense that we do, sadly, sometimes find in large team projects; secondly, that we are working together towards a new framework for methods, analysis and presentation of empirical material on Gulf migration. We had some very intense and excited conversations on day two, and it’s plain that we have enormous goodwill, shared understandings across disciplines and a will to listen and build together. We are hoping and planning to break the mould and it does look from our meeting this week as though we will be doing that. More on this as we go along.
