Hee Eun Kwon

Hee Eun Kwon is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Tokyo College, University of Tokyo. She earned her PhD in Sociology from the University of California, San Diego. A sociologist and qualitative researcher, her work focuses on international migration, culture, and race/ethnicity. Her current research explores how temporary migrants experience belonging, through the lens of cosmopolitanism. During her time at the Collège de France, she will continue developing her book project as a Marguerite Fellow.

The project

Title: Stratified Cosmopolitanism: Belonging and Exclusion in the UAE

"This project explores the everyday lives of temporary migrants striving to create a sense of “home” in the Gulf emirate of Dubai. Although primarily recruited for their labour and excluded from naturalisation or permanent residency, many temporary migrants still develop some degree of belonging within the host community. How do they navigate these exclusionary contexts to feel a sense of belonging? I address these questions using data gathered from ethnographic fieldwork in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE). Drawing chiefly on 32 months of multi-sited ethnographic research conducted at the textile market and a global exposition, supplemented by 65 in-depth interviews and content analysis, I demonstrate how these migrants foster a sense of belonging despite everyday marginalisation by adopting the governmental narrative of Dubai as a beacon of cosmopolitanism."

Hosting institution: Collège de France

Selective Bibliography

• Kwon Hee Eun (2023). Performance of Cosmopolitanism: Temporary Migrants and their Sense of Belonging in Dubai. UC San Diego. ProQuest ID: Kwon_ucsd_0033D_22260. Merritt ID: ark:/13030/m58146m8. Retrieved from