Later-in-life mobility and migration to Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates: family, life course and linked lives

Scholars of Gulf migration have come to pay increasing attention to the intersections of migration, mobility, and family lives in the context of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). However, there remains a marked absence of dedicated analysis focusing on the family lives of those who move for the purposes of work later in their professional lives. This thesis contributes to existing Gulf migration literature – and family migration studies more broadly – through a dedicated examination of transnational family lives and professional mobility at a later stage of the life course, in this thesis referred to as ‘later-in-life’. Theoretically, this study is informed by a life-course perspective, in which the principle of linked lives and the embedded concepts of relationality, time, and human agency provide the analytical thread through the empirical discussion. My study draws on data gathered over 18 months of fieldwork in which 84 ‘mapping-interviews’ were carried out with 40 respondents aged 50 and above. The sample is made up of couples and those who moved to Abu Dhabi without a partner. The mapping-interview method, for which I combined respondent-generated mobility maps with semi-longitudinal interviews, makes a methodological contribution to existing scholarship in that it brings the complex interplay of life course, family lives, emotion, distance and proximity into sharper focus. The findings of my study draw attention to: the multifaceted mobility of later-in-life mobility flows and the existence of both privilege and precarity within those flows; the innovative ways in which older mobile professionals build family practices to maintain togetherness across distance and time; and the continued significance of mobility to individuals’ sense of self and to family lives beyond the migrant emplacement. I contend that in the ‘post-Abu Dhabi’ time of the life course, ongoing mobility practices offer possibilities for negotiation of the self later-in-life, although within a set of constraints that highlights a tension between enforced stasis and desired continued mobility.