#Dubailiving and Digital Placemaking on TikTok: Migrant, Domestic, and Service Workers’ Affective Social Mediascapes

Abstract

While Dubai, the small emirate in the United Arab Emirates, tends to be associated with luxurious social media images of elite social actors, startling architecture, and consumer status symbols, this study addresses migrant, domestic, and service workers’ everyday digital placemaking. To explore these issues, a global semiotic framework reorientates traditional notions of the geopolitical context in terms of Dubai’s social mediascape. TikTok is taken as a case to explore a corpus of Dubai-related hashtags and content being shared by migrant, domestic, and service workers. The central argument of the article is that, while Dubai’s social media cultures reflect hegemonies of Gulf governance and TikTok’s algorithms, they are also infused by workers’ affective digital-placemaking as a form of neoliberal resilience to communicative capitalism and deterritorialization in the social media age. Overall, the article provides much-needed insights into how social mediashapes and is shaped by transnational social actors’ digital placemaking in the Middle East region.