The Habitus of Empowerment: Constructing Intersectional and Transnational Muslim Womanhood Through Education

• In Event: Roundtable Session 23
  In Roundtable Session: Arab and Muslim Experiences in School Contexts

Abstract

In the post 9/11 era, women’s education is increasingly seen as a viable solution to the issues ranging from gender discrimination and poverty to religious extremism. This paper shows how the educational policies focusing on women are translated into local contexts. Through employing ethnographic data collected with the women teachers from marginalized communities in Pakistan, I show how these teachers define “quality education” as transferring middle-class cultural capital to the girls from low-income communities, and approach “gender empowerment” as collective empowerment of families and communities. This paper challenges the idea of quality education as a universal set of policies and practices, and shows the processes through which international educational policies are shaped by social and cultural values in different contexts.

Author

• Ayesha Khurshid, Florida State University