Examines labor migration from India to the Gulf region
Professor Wright's research explores the oil industry in the Arabian Sea from the 1940s to the present in order to understand connections between energy, governance, and rights. She uses ethnographic and historic methodologies to examine labor migration from India to the oilfields of the Arabic-speaking Gulf. Based on this research, she is currently working on two book projects: “From Slavery to Contract” and “Between Dreams and Ghosts.”
“From Slavery to Contract: An Anthropological History of Labor and Oil in the Arabian Sea” looks at the history of transnational labor at British oil projects in the Gulf and Arabian Peninsula. At those projects, she looks at working conditions, hiring practices, and worker strikes from the 1940s to the early 1970s. This is a period that includes the end of formal British imperialism in the Gulf and South Asia and the early years of postcolonial states. This examination of labor and oil demonstrates that, in the mid-twentieth century, oil was increasingly associated with national security and that this association was used to evacuate politics from the oilfields.
“Between Dreams and Ghosts: Indian Migration and Middle Eastern Oil” examines labor migration as a social process that draws upon and influences not only migrants’ own communities but also contemporary governance and capitalism. It does so through use of multi-sited ethnographic research conducted in India and the Arabic-speaking Gulf. She follows migrants from their homes in rural India to job sites in the Middle East and include all parties involved in supplying manpower to the oilfields. Through focusing on the process of migration and the multiple actors involved, she critically interrogates the standard view of contemporary globalization, which understands neoliberal reforms as a process that happens from the top-down. Instead, “Between Dreams and Ghosts” shows how migrants, along with low-level bureaucrats, oil company project managers, and small business owners in India, all shape transnational migration and, in doing so, global capitalism.
