The Africa Institute at Global Studies University presents “Migratory Republic: Multispecies Worldmaking in the United Arab Emirates,” a lecture by Dr. Neha Vora, Professor of Anthropology in the Department of International Studies at the American University of Sharjah, as part of its Fall 2026 Faculty Seminar Series.
Drawing on ethnographic research on street cat care in the UAE, Dr. Vora explores how human and nonhuman lives intersect in cities shaped by migration, rapid development, and unequal belonging.
The discussion will be moderated by Dr. Yousuf Al-Bulushi, Ali A. Mazrui Senior Fellow at The Africa Institute, Global Studies University, and Associate Professor in the Department of Global & International Studies at the University of California, Irvine.
Abstract
This seminar examines how human and nonhuman lives become entangled within cities structured by migration, rapid development, and unequal belonging. Drawing on ethnographic research on street cat care in the United Arab Emirates, Vora asks what becomes visible when we understand cats not simply as metaphors for migrant experience, but as urban subjects whose movements, attachments, and uses of infrastructure shape the city itself.
She begins with everyday feeding circuits and the “microarchitectures of care” they produce, asking how residents make homes, relationships, and multispecies communities within conditions of transience and organized abandonment. Vora places Gulf studies in conversation with Global South urban theory and longer histories of Indian Ocean circulation to consider how categories such as native and foreign, formal and informal, and human and nonhuman are continually made and unsettled.
From this work, she develops the idea of “reparative ecology” to ask what responsibilities humans have toward beings whose dependency, displacement, and vulnerability we have helped produce, and how everyday practices of care might enable the emergence of multispecies publics within damaged and already hybrid worlds.
About the Speaker
Neha Vora is Professor of Anthropology in the Department of International Studies at the American University of Sharjah. Her research and teaching interests include diasporas and migration, citizenship, globalized higher education, gender, liberalism, political economy, and human-nonhuman encounters, primarily in the Arabian Peninsula.
She is the author of Impossible Citizens: Dubai’s Indian Diaspora (Duke University Press, 2013) and Teach for Arabia: American Universities, Liberalism, and Transnational Qatar (Stanford University Press, 2018). With Ahmed Kanna and Amélie Le Renard, she coauthored Beyond Exception: New Interpretations of the Arabian Peninsula (Cornell University Press, 2020).
Her current research approaches Dubai and other Gulf cities as sites of entangled precarities between humans and nonhumans, paying particular attention to informal stray cat care by immigrants and the placemaking practices of cats themselves.
About the Moderator
Yousuf Al-Bulushi is the Ali A. Mazrui Senior Fellow at The Africa Institute, Global Studies University, and Associate Professor in the Department of Global & International Studies at the University of California, Irvine. Read more.
About the Faculty Seminar Series
Part of The Africa Institute’s ongoing intellectual program, the Faculty Seminar Series brings scholars and practitioners into conversation with faculty, fellows, students, and the wider academic community to examine critical questions in the humanities, arts, and social sciences.
