Learning to see from the outside
Since moving to the UAE, I’ve been thinking about how religion is part of everyday life here. I knew about the call to prayer before I came, but knowing about it is different from beginning to experience how it connects with community life.
I spent 18 years in China, where my experience was of religion being highly regulated and more separate from daily public life. I became fluent in Chinese and felt deeply connected to the country, but there were still small cultural things I couldn’t quite grasp. I was still laowai, the foreigner, the outsider. At a recent dinner with colleagues, I heard reflections of that same disconnect one can feel as a foreigner. It brought back something familiar, even though the contexts are very different.
I’ve been thinking about this while working with Lucy Bailey on our recent research. What stayed with me was the care she brought to reflexivity, and to asking what each of us might be missing. It made me think about how much of a person’s history and sense of belonging cannot be understood through outward appearance alone.
Lucy drew my attention to the connections between ethnicity, language, tribal affiliations, different Muslim traditions, and social hierarchies. A name might carry histories and relationships that others recognize immediately, but that I cannot read. She helped me reflect on how much of that nuance sits beyond the categories we use in research and everyday life.
In our study of UAE IB school leaders, Anglo-European name origins were more concentrated in higher-fee schools, while Arab/MENA name origins were more concentrated in lower-fee schools. Lucy suggested there may be something deeper behind those patterns, and I agree. Names alone cannot establish someone’s ethnicity, religion, or the social relationships that shape their opportunities and belonging. Even with those limitations, the pattern is consistent with positional closure, suggesting that some backgrounds and pathways may carry greater legitimacy for leadership in higher-fee schools than others.
This matters for Emiratisation too. Increasing Emirati participation in leadership may leave positional inequalities intact if access to the more advantaged parts of the school market remains uneven. We therefore need to consider both how many Emirati educators become leaders and which schools they get to lead.
At the same time, these name-origin patterns have also made me question whether the Christian associations often made in international schooling leadership research apply in the same way in the UAE. My sense is that they don’t, although our data cannot establish people’s religious identities. That possibility adds another layer to how I’m thinking about leadership in international schools here. I’m excited to spend more time here, listen, and learn.