Postdoctoral Fellow KWON Hee Eun Awarded the AGAPS Gwenn Okruhlik Dissertation Award

Tokyo College's Postdoctoral Fellow KWON Hee Eun was awarded the 2023 Association for Gulf and Arabian Peninsula Studies (AGAPS) Gwenn Okruhlik Dissertation Award. Dr. Kwon's dissertation, "Performance of Cosmopolitanism: Temporary Migrants and their Sense of Belonging in Dubai," investigates cosmopolitanism as a social performance by drawing on 32 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

AGAPS finds this dissertation important because it "gives rich insights into life within a significant demographic in Dubai, raising original questions and developing insightful ways of responding to them. It also raises interesting questions about the political work done by official discourses of cosmopolitanism, to mask racialized, gendered and class hierarchies, attract labor migrants and construct a certain sense of belonging despite profound and insurmountable structural inequalities." In the words of another committee member, "this study helps us reconceptualize the spaces and faces of cosmopolitan encounters and reveals that there is still so much more to say and consider in the study of modern cosmopolitan experiences."