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Cosmopolitanism And Urban Space In Doha, Qatar, Andrew M. Gardner

All Faculty Scholarship

This essay commences with an ethnographic sojourn through the Industrial Area, a peripheral zone of the urban landscape in Doha, Qatar that is densely inhabited by low wage migrant laborers. In this segregated urban enclave, I ascertain the openness to alterity and the interactions with difference that connect their experiences to the conceptual legacy of cosmopolitanism. Via a discussion of the segregated experiences of transnational migrants in Doha’s urban landscape, I then stake out a speculative argument for the connection between that segregation and the resulting cosmopolitan conditions. Together, these two assertions explore manifestations of cosmopolitan urbanism in non-Western and …