About
Established in March 1999, the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at the University of California-San Diego is an interdisciplinary, multinational research and training program devoted to comparative (especially cross-national) work on international migration and refugee movements. Its main intellectual agenda is to systematically compare the U.S. immigration experience - historical and contemporary--with that of other labor-importing countries in other regions (especially the Asia-Pacific, Latin America, and Western Europe). It conducts multi-year research projects, holds research conferences, workshops and seminars, hosts visiting research fellows at both the pre- and postdoctoral levels, and publishes monographs and working papers. The Center also conducts field research in immigrant-receiving and sending countries, and trains undergraduates and graduate students to gather primary data among immigrant and refugee populations.
For more information about CCIS and to access previous working papers, go to: http://ccis.ucsd.edu/publications/papers.html
Center for Comparative Immigration Studies
Working Papers (197)
Global Products, Embedded Contexts: The Interpretation of Consumption Practices Among Palestinian Migrants in Amman
Amid the frenzied consumption of villas, clothing, technology, and services characteristic of up-scale living in Amman, the most conspicuous of the conspicuous consumers are popularly identified as wealthy Palestinians who entered Jordan in the aftermath of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. This presentation will focus on these “returnees” to Jordan – some of whom had never lived in Jordan prior to the invasion – and more specifically, the relationships among their consumption practices, conflicting notions of taste among Amman’s elites, and the emergence of a “Gulfie” Palestinian identity. Despite the global aspects of elite Palestinian returnee consumption, a convincing interpretation of its sociocultural importance must make reference to factors embedded in social, political, and economic contexts unique to the Jordanian experience.