Linguistic Infrastructures and New Gendered Digital Selves in an Imminently Post-Oil UAE

Linguistic Infrastructures and New Gendered Digital Selves in an Imminently Post-Oil UAE

In this talk, I develop the concept of linguistic infrastructure to capture the ways language policies, technologies, and institutions enable the circulation of people and capital across national and transnational domains. English, I argue, forms the basis of a linguistic infrastructure that enables Emirati women to advance professionally in multinational organizations, attain state leadership positions, become social media influencers, and otherwise achieve forms of social and economic mobility that are historically quite new. Through a linguistic anthropology focus, I illustrate the way social media functions as an exemplary linguistic infrastructure that enables women to avail of the media’s English-mediated affordances to perform new modes of citizenship to compatriots and international followers.