This is a conversation with Daryn Howland. She’s a Beirut-based researcher who recently finished her MA thesis entitled “racist capital: the racialization of migrant labor under the kafala system in Beirut”, the subject of our discussion. You can read the thesis in its current format here.
Daryn argues that the racialisation and dehumanisation of migrant domestic workers under the Kafala system in Lebanon contains four components:
- Commodification
- Inferiorization
- Criminalization
- Sexualization