Pardis Mahdavi, Former Fellow, Woodrow Wilson Center and Associate Professor, Pomona College

Gridlock draws on four years of Mahdavi's ethnographic research in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to look at the disconnections between policies on human trafficking and the realities of gendered labor and migration in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. The project seeks to describe the experiences of migrant women and men in the Middle East, and how their narratives have been constructed and misheard by policymakers and activists seeking to legislate on and label their experiences, and possible steps that should be taken to improve policy, discourse and activism.