Migrant Domestic Workers in the Middle East

"This edited volume, based on ethnographic fieldwork, provides important new insights in the everyday lives of migrant domestic workers in the Middle East. With the home turned into a workplace and privacy to be found in the public, it unsettles conventional notions about the public and the private. Employing agency and mobility as key terms, the case studies go beyond the employer domestic worker relation, and convincingly show how foreign domestics forge new socialities through support networks and activism, through developing new religious ties and communities, and through marriage and childbearing." - Annelies Moors, professor of Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

"This collection of essays is a significant addition to the growing literature and concern about migrant domestic workers around the world. Acknowledging but transcending human rights discourse of restriction and abuse, these scholarly elaborations reveal the equally important nuances of agency of Asian and African women and how they cope as individuals and as communities in the Middle East." - Ray Jureidini, professor of Ethics and Migration, Center for Islamic Legislation and Ethics, Hamad Bin Khalifa University