The Sand Diaries: Exploring Intersectionality, Agency, Identity, and Knowing in a Saudi Arabian Women’s University

• In Event: Roundtable Session 29
  In Roundtable Session: Transgressing National Boundaries, Troubling LGBTA (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Allies) Histories, Identities, Sexualities

Abstract

This presentation examines how the young women of Effat University, Saudi Arabia’s first private university for women, deal with being “living contradictions”, straddling the lines of “traditional” and “Western” cultures while preparing to participate in a patriarchal society that has yet to find a place for them in the public sphere.
Through the lens of narrative inquiry and self-study, I explore how their struggle makes problematic issues of empowerment, identity, agency and voice in the meaning and knowledge-making process. The tenuous issue of women’s education in the kingdom and women’s desire to re-draw the social, cultural and educational borders illuminates the complexities and paradoxes inherent in living at the crest of globalization, where culture and tradition, east and west, break.

Author

• Anastasia Kamanos, Bishop's University