El Ghorba fil Gharb: Conceptualizing ethnic identity with Saudi women graduate students in the U.S.
[Thesis]
Katharina Barth
Happel-Parkins, Alison; Mueller, Christian E.
The University of Memphis
2016
302
Place of publication: United States, Ann Arbor; ISBN=978-1-369-39462-7
Ph.D.
The University of Memphis
2016
This narrative inquiry examined how ethnic identity is conceptualized in the stories of Saudi women students living and studying in the United States. This was done using theorists from the field of ethnic identity and enculturation research, as well as postcolonial feminist critique to address various layers of marginality and power relations. Participants included seven women enrolled as international students in graduate programs at two northeastern U.S. universities. Unstructured life-story interviews of 2 to 2.5 hrs. were conducted to elicit narratives of how the women positioned themselves ethnically and how they were positioned by their surrounding while living in the suburbs of the metropolitan city Gamuston and attending East Atlantic University and Gariana University (pseudonyms). The rhizoanalytic approach of "plugging in" (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012) theorists into the women's narratives was used to interrogate the intricate workings of ethnic identity positionalities in the socio-cultural, gender, and geopolitical contexts that inform them. Each woman's restoried narrative is presented individually, and chunks of interview data are interrogated by "plugging in" the concepts of marginality (Spivak, 1990), catachresis (Spivak, 1993/2009), and multidimensionality of power relations (Sandoval, 2000).