Sponsorship, space and the city: everyday lives of migrant domestic workers in Beirut

This dissertation explores the everyday lives of Migrant Domestic Workers (MDWs) in Beirut. Through an engaged ethnographic participation in MDWs’ spaces (political spaces, economic spaces, NGOs, religious spaces and leisure spaces), I examine how the kafala or sponsorship system administering domestic work manifests spatially in the everyday lives of MDWs in the city of Beirut. I argue that whereas the kafala imposes many restraints on MDWs’ freedom of mobility, access to and usage of city space, their acts of contestation of these restraints, as well as individual and collective actions, give new meanings to these spaces. This thesis is meant to engage in debates essentially within the fields of urban anthropology, urban sociology, feminist geography, anthropology of space and place, gender theory and studies of migration in the Middle East. Keywords: migrant domestic workers, kafala, space, city, boundaries, placemaking, body, intersectionality