Migration narratives and urban space management: the politics of migrant worker housing in Doha
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper investigates the politics surrounding the segregated housing of migrant workers in Doha. The issue drew global media scrutiny ahead of the 2022 FIFA World Cup, with commentators condemning migrant workers' deplorable living conditions. Meanwhile, local authorities strived to create a counter-narrative by highlighting their attempts to enhance housing standards. This study aims to deconstruct the varied migration narratives, shaping the creation of such urban spaces, characterised by the segregation and enclosure of migrant workers. The research combines the analysis of census data, strategic planning documents and media reports and fieldwork conducted in 2018 and 2022. This fieldwork included site visits and interviews with diverse stakeholders, including international organisations, government officials and migrant NGOs. The paper argues that these segregated migrant accommodations constitute transient spaces that materialise and project the city's regime of temporary and circular migration. The construction of these urban spaces serves a communicative purpose, which I describe as narrative enclosures. Segregated migrant worker housing does not merely serve to control the movement and lives of these workers; it also shapes the narratives surrounding their living conditions and their place within the urban production system and society.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".