Claire Cooley

The UAE’s rise as a global media hub depends on racialized labor regimes shaped by colonial legacies, logistics, and digital infrastructures. While globally mobile stars like Shah Rukh Khan and Mohamed Ramadan circulate through elite promotional and entertainment circuits, other migrant workers build and sustain the material and technical systems on which the industry depends. This project argues that media infrastructures are not neutral supports for cultural production, but racializing systems that organize mobility, labor, and audibility, situating Gulf labor within global media industries. Using a sonic methodology, it traces how these hierarchies become perceptible in accent, dubbing, translation, noise, and silence, while also examining how migrant workers’ expressive practices—from singing competitions to radio and online performance—make audible forms of life and labor often left out of official media narratives.