Faisal Hamadah

Faisal Hamadah received his PhD from Queen Mary’s Department of Drama. His PhD was on the institutional and aesthetic development of Kuwaiti theatre, and how this was affected by Kuwait's state-building project and the development of capitalist social and economic relations within the state and internationally. His most recent publication deals with contemporary attempts to reform the kafala system of labor arbitrage and governance, and how these attempts contend with the internationalization and privatization of social reproduction in the GCC. He has a forthcoming publication on Arab migrant artists to the UK, and how their attempts to produce work navigate the UK's 'Hostile Environment' migration policy. He is also working on a group project with healthcare researchers and professionals to look at health inequality outcomes in Kuwait stratified between citizens, stateless residents, and migrants with the aim to develop an outcomes-based framework for public health professionals and researchers. 

For the project 'Supporting Knowledge and Mapping Regional Connections: China and Contemporary Development in the Middle East' he will be looking at the activities of the GCC sovereign wealth funds in the Chinese economy, and reading these activities against the history of international development aid between China and the GCC. A key part of the project will include a comparative institutional history of the numerous sovereign wealth funds in the GCC. This will be a vital dimension of the project, as the different SWFs have different relationships to China both as a strategic partner but also as a site for investment. In providing a comparative history, one that roots the developments and trajectories of the SWFs in the political economies of the different GCC states both internally and internationally, the project aims to understand why different SWFs end up having different approaches to China. Beyond this, the project will aim to understand how wider state commercial activity influences or directs the remits of the sovereign wealth funds. To this end, the project will distinguish between SWF investment and other forms of political and economic flows in order to understand what role the SWFs formally play in domestic and international political economy.

Beyond these activities, he is interested in comparative histories of global capitalism, critical theory, and Marxian theories of racialization and migration. He has recently begun a new project on the representations of migration in Kuwaiti leftist periodicals, and how these representations are modulated by the development of capitalism and what is popularly called the rentier state.