Welcome to a page about social anthropologist Caroline Osella’s project for the REALM portfolio, part of Columbia University‘s  INCITE mission.  REALM (Research and Empirical Analysis of Labour Migration) is a linked group of projects about Gulf migration, which is being funded and run by Columbia University and and New York University, Abu Dhabi. REALM is part of the bigger lab, INCITE, which stands for Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics.  

I’ll be putting links, information, short news updates and longer progress reports about the project on this site as we go along. You’ll mostly be reading about my part of the the project here, but I’ll also add links where you can find out about other researchers’ work and how their projects are going.

My part of the REALM initiative is a 2 year project, March 2017 – April 2019, titled:

The Paradox of the Gulf as a Space of Aspiration and Freedom.

I’ll be collecting stories from Malayali Gulf migrants and retired or returned Malayali Gulf migrants and writing about them.

In Kerala, I’m concentrating on talking to people from the two places I know best, and where I have done lots of work in the past:  Mavelikara area; and Calicut / Kozhikode area.

I will be especially speaking to people from these two areas who work or have worked in any of these three Gulf sites:  Abu Dhabi, UAE; Ras-al-Khaimah, UAE; Muscat, Oman.  (Google map link here).  If you would like to find out more about this process, or you think you might be interested to be one of the people who gets to tell their ‘Gulf stories’, follow me here.