Dr Attiya Ahmad (Columbian College of Arts and Sciences) presents the talk "Housetalk and Everyday Conversions: South Asian Migrant Domestic Workers' Newfound Islamic Pieties in Kuwait"

Why are domestic workers converting to Islam in the Arabian Peninsula and Persian Gulf region? Based on extensive fieldwork conducted among South Asian migrant women in Kuwait, Ahmad's talk explores how domestic workers’ Muslim belonging emerges from their work in Kuwaiti households as they develop Islamic piety in relation—but not opposition—to their existing religious practices, family ties, and ethnic and national belonging. Their conversion is less a clean break from their preexisting lives than it is a refashioning in response to their everyday experiences. In examining the connections between migration, labor, gender, and Islam, Ahmad complicates conventional understandings of the dynamics of religious conversion and the feminization of transnational labor migration while proposing the concept of everyday conversion as a way to think more broadly about emergent forms of subjectivity, affinity, and belonging.