There Is More Than the Brick, Garment, and Storefront: How South Asian Men Live Belonging in Amman

Date of Award

6-26-2026

Date Published

July 2026

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Geography & the Environment

Advisor(s)

Timur Hammond

Second Advisor

Gretchen Purser

Subject Categories

Geography | Social and Behavioral Sciences

Abstract

Migration continues to be central to the making of the Jordanian nation and state, yet the lives of South Asian migrant workers remain largely absent from how both are narrated and studied. Drawing on four months of ethnographic fieldwork with South Asian men across Amman, this thesis examines how migrant belonging takes shape through the everyday practices, relations, and movements that structure life across the capital city. In Jordan, migrant labor is legally governed through Kafala, a sponsorship-based system that ties non-national workers’ residency and employment to national sponsors through fixed-term contracts. Relevant migration scholarship often centers Kafala as a key analytic, approaching belonging through frameworks of structural exclusion, exploitation, and a rigid national–non-national divide. While these accounts remain important, they do not fully capture how migrant life is lived on the ground. I argue that migrant belonging in Amman can be best understood through a frame that centers the migrant as the subject within discussions of Kafala geopolitics. And, in doing so, an attentiveness to the everyday negotiations and practices of social membership and relational placemaking is needed. This project intervenes in the literature on migration geopolitics, nationalism and citizenship, and Middle East studies in two key ways. First, it addresses a gendered gap in scholarship in the MENA region that has largely focused on female domestic labor. Second, it employs a relational reading of Kafala that places situated knowledge of urban migrant worker lifeworlds in Jordan within broader dynamics of urban space and everyday social relations. Working with Indian, Bangladeshi, Pakistani, and Sri Lankan men employed as bricklayers, factory workers, and businessmen across the city, this research offers a spatialized account of migrant belonging grounded in the everyday urban geographies of Amman, extending debates on how non-national residents live and make place beyond formal citizenship.

Access

SURFACE provides description only. Full text may be available to ProQuest subscribers. Please ask your Librarian for assistance.

This document is currently not available here.

Share

COinS