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Papers by Behzad Sarmadi

International Journal of Middle East Studies

This article addresses Dubai's recent financial crisis, bringing an ethnographic approach to ‘fin... more This article addresses Dubai's recent financial crisis, bringing an ethnographic approach to ‘financialization’. It does so by repurposing the financial concept of ‘standstill’. Focusing on the consequences of the Dubai government's infamous ‘standstill announcement’, in late 2009, it argues that unpacking the literal and figurative registers of this concept offers insights into the political economy and lived experiences of financial crises.

This article examines the ‘bachelor’ as a key figure in Dubai's emergent urbanism. The recent sur... more This article examines the ‘bachelor’ as a key figure in Dubai's emergent urbanism. The recent surge in Dubai's population has seen the specter of a ‘demographic imbalance’ increasingly invoked in public discourse. Buttressing this discourse was a campaign to tackle ‘overcrowding’ by the municipality, at a time when its authority was being challenged by the so-called master developers planning ‘New Dubai’ in the urban periphery. The ‘bachelor’, I argue, is deployed as an objectified social type manifesting this imbalance and its misplacement in the city. While the ‘bachelor’ has already been noted in previous scholarship, this article focuses on the production of this category as a form of Othering. It examines how the moral threat arising from imbalance is identified with a particular segment of society through this social type, transposed onto their bodily abjection, mapped out in the city, and made available for control through the threat of removal.

Public Anthropology by Behzad Sarmadi

A brief essay on the culture concept from the perspective of a diaspora-Iranian.

Teaching Documents by Behzad Sarmadi

International Journal of Middle East Studies

This article addresses Dubai's recent financial crisis, bringing an ethnographic approach to ‘fin... more This article addresses Dubai's recent financial crisis, bringing an ethnographic approach to ‘financialization’. It does so by repurposing the financial concept of ‘standstill’. Focusing on the consequences of the Dubai government's infamous ‘standstill announcement’, in late 2009, it argues that unpacking the literal and figurative registers of this concept offers insights into the political economy and lived experiences of financial crises.

This article examines the ‘bachelor’ as a key figure in Dubai's emergent urbanism. The recent sur... more This article examines the ‘bachelor’ as a key figure in Dubai's emergent urbanism. The recent surge in Dubai's population has seen the specter of a ‘demographic imbalance’ increasingly invoked in public discourse. Buttressing this discourse was a campaign to tackle ‘overcrowding’ by the municipality, at a time when its authority was being challenged by the so-called master developers planning ‘New Dubai’ in the urban periphery. The ‘bachelor’, I argue, is deployed as an objectified social type manifesting this imbalance and its misplacement in the city. While the ‘bachelor’ has already been noted in previous scholarship, this article focuses on the production of this category as a form of Othering. It examines how the moral threat arising from imbalance is identified with a particular segment of society through this social type, transposed onto their bodily abjection, mapped out in the city, and made available for control through the threat of removal.

A brief essay on the culture concept from the perspective of a diaspora-Iranian.

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