Center for International and Regional Studies

Book Talk: Remittance as Belonging
2026-06-24 08:00 - 17:00 (Asia/Qatar)
The Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS) hosted a thought-provoking book talk with Professor Hasan Mahmud, author of Remittance as Belonging: Global Migration, Transnationalism, and the Quest for Home (Rutgers University Press). Moderated by Zahra Babar and Professor Amanda Garrett, the conversation delved into the moral, social, and emotional dimensions of remittances, reimagining them as acts of care, obligation, and identity that link migrants to their homes across borders. Drawing from ethnographic research with Bangladeshi migrants in Los Angeles and Tokyo, Professor Mahmud explored how remittance practices challenge conventional understandings of integration, citizenship, and belonging, revealing the deeply human stories behind economic exchange and migration.

Opening remarks introduced the book’s core proposition: remittances are not simply economic transfers. Rather, they are social acts grounded in obligation, care, and identity. The event also formed part of a broader CIRS research initiative on migration from the Global South. Drawing on three and a half years of ethnographic fieldwork with Bangladeshi migrants in Los Angeles and Tokyo, Professor Mahmud advanced a multidimensional conception of “home” as locational, relational, and aspirational. He showed how migrants enacted belonging across borders through financial support, investments, and gifts, and he challenged economic models that reduced remittances to altruism versus self interest. Instead, he located remitting in enduring social relationships and cultural expectations that shaped who sent money, to whom, and why.

Professor Mahmud contrasted incorporation contexts. In Japan, restrictive legal pathways and persistent social exclusion encouraged migrants to imagine their stays as temporary; remittances there tended to be frequent and oriented toward return, including investments in land and housing. In the United States, even with opportunities for settlement, citizenship, and family reunification, migrants continued to remit, although motives shifted over time: early transfers sustained relatives, later transfers helped restore status through property investments, and established professionals often turned to philanthropic giving in home communities. Across both sites, Bangladesh remained an anchor of belonging.

Audience questions highlighted the emotional labor that underwrote remittances on both sides of the border, including gendered obligations and intra family negotiations. Participants also raised the phenomenon of reverse remittances, when families in Bangladesh temporarily supported migrants during periods of precarity abroad. These dynamics complicated policy narratives that instrumentalized remittances as development finance and underscored the limitations of treating money in motion as a simple economic variable.

Article by Maryam Daud, Administrative Assistant at CIRS.

Speakers:

Hasan Mahmud is assistant professor in residence at Northwestern University in Qatar. He has a PhD in sociology from the University of California Los Angeles, an MA in global studies from Sophia University in Tokyo, and an MSS and a BSS in sociology from the University of Dhaka in Bangladesh. He was a visiting faculty member in the Department of Sociology at Ball State University prior to coming to NU-Q. His teaching and research interests include sociological theories, globalization, international migration and development, identity politics, and global ethnography. His research has appeared in such publications as Current Sociology, Migration & Development, Contemporary Justice Review, and Journal of Socio-economic Research and Development.

Amanda Garrett is Assistant Professor of Comparative and International Politics at Georgetown University in Qatar. Her research focuses on migration and ethnic diversity in advanced democracies, including immigration and integration, ethnic violence, minority political incorporation, and Islam in Western societies. Her current book project, developed from her Harvard PhD dissertation When Cities Fight Back, examines when religious or ethnic minorities use violence as political expression in France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and the United States. She has held appointments at Harvard University, New York University, Sciences Po, and the German Bundestag, and received the 2014 APSA Ernst B. Haas Best Dissertation Award.

Zahra Babar is the Executive Director at CIRS at Georgetown University in Qatar. Previously, she has served with the International Labor Organization and the United Nations Development Program. Her current research interests include rural development, migration and labor policies, and citizenship in the Persian Gulf states.

Launch Event: Migrant Stories from Qatar
2026-06-25 08:00 - 17:00
Join us for the launch of the Migrant Stories from Qatar project website!

This project brings together oral histories from migrant workers across Qatar, offering rare insight into their lived experiences and contributions to the country’s social and economic fabric. The six principal investigators will reflect on the research process, its findings, and the broader significance of archiving migrant voices in Qatar, an endeavor that seeks to reframe narratives of labor, belonging, and memory in the Gulf.

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On November 10, the Center for International and Regional Studies held the official launch of the Migrant Stories in Qatar project website, a digital platform dedicated to preserving and sharing the lived experiences of migrant workers in Qatar. Conceived as a long–term public resource, the project curates oral histories, testimonials, and personal narratives that illuminate the social worlds, aspirations, and challenges of the migrant communities whose labor has shaped the contemporary Gulf. It seeks to democratize knowledge production by placing migrant workers not merely as subjects of study, but as active contributors and curators of their own histories.

Zahra Babar, the project emerged from intimate exchanges with migrants and from frustration with how their voices are routinely mediated, silenced, or reduced to anonymous data points. The website functions as a counter archive that democratizes knowledge production by coproducing narratives with migrant workers themselves and making these stories accessible to migrants, their families, and wider publics.

Speakers at the launch highlighted the project’s methodological, ethical, and political stakes. Trish Kahle and Nadya Sbaiti situated the archive within broader efforts to document global south histories at a time when formal state archives remain inaccessible, arguing that migrant narratives reveal migrants not as marginal to the Gulf, but as central to its social and economic order.

Noha Aboueldahab drew attention to the global significance of these testimonies, observing that themes of law, its absence, and its uneven application recur across the interviews. She argued that oral histories offer multiple truths that complicate existing legal narratives and have important implications for fields such as international law and transitional justice. Integrating such testimonies into legal analysis, she suggested, could transform understandings of rights, accountability, and lived experience.

The project also involves extensive technical and linguistic labor. Suzi Migani, responsible for recording and editing the English–language podcasts, spoke about the logistical challenges of conducting interviews and the delicate process of editing without inadvertently shaping the narrative. She explained that the platform provides two versions of each interview: a full recording with only identifying details removed, and a shorter public podcast episode of approximately fifteen minutes. Misba Bhatti, who leads editing in hindustaani, described the complexity of translation and the responsibility to convey meaning and emotion with accuracy and integrity.

Together, these interventions articulate Migrant Stories in Qatar as both an archive and a collaborative intellectual project that reclaims authorship for migrant workers in and beyond Qatar.

Cotton Queen | Film Screening and Panel Discussion
2026-01-26 18:30 - 21:00
Join us for the screening of Cotton Queen, register below!

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Cotton Queen is a 2025 internationally co-produced drama written and directed by Suzi Mirgani in her feature directorial debut. Set in a cotton-farming village in Sudan, the film follows Nafisa, a young woman raised on her grandmother’s stories of resistance against British colonial rule. When a businessman arrives with a development scheme centered on genetically engineered cotton, Nafisa finds herself at the heart of a quiet but fierce power struggle that exposes the entanglements of land, memory, gender, and exploitation.

The film had its world premiere at the Venice International Film Festival in September 2025 and has since received wide international acclaim, including the Golden Alexander Award for Best Feature Film at the Thessaloniki International Film Festival. With a haunting score by Amine Bouhafa and striking cinematography by Frida Marzouk, Cotton Queen is a powerful meditation on resistance, inheritance, and the cost of so-called progress.
