Living Language Policy Through Stratified Space: A Linguistic Ethnography in the United Arab Emirates

This project explores the lived language policy experiences of a group of foreign residents (noncitizens with fixed-term visas) who live in Ras Al Khaimah, a small city in the United Arab Emirates. The primary set of participants are staff and students recruited from a private language school in the city but the project expands well beyond the school premises, following these individuals as they make their way through the complex policies and interactions that shape their everyday lives. As a critical ethnographic project, it draws on a range of empirical data including: monthly interviews with primary informants; single interviews with other residents of the city; observations of city spaces discussed in these interviews; national and institutional policy documents; physical documents for city spaces; and media reports and commentary. It also uses a broad set of theoretical tools to analyse this data, such as: Foucaults (1988; 2007; 2008) discussions of neoliberalism, governmentality and technologies of the self; sociospatial conceptualizations of scale; and conviviality. This analysis focuses on how subjectivities are produced or claimed within language policy apparatuses as well as how city space is constructed in ethnolinguistic terms. The project offers a discussion of language policy and practice from the perspectives of the under-researched foreign resident population of the UAE. These perspectives allowed for a rich picture of the ethnolinguistic and socioeconomic boundaries that define everyday interactions in Ras Al Khaimah and the country as a whole. The project also demonstrates the importance of sites of such as Ras Al Khaimah for language policy research. In this space of both high mobility and structured immobility, individuals from all over the world find themselves in regular contact with one another while at the same time often being spatially segregated along lines of race, class and/or gender. This is a city in which the flows of global capitalism are made visible and their implications for language policy can be explored.