"Stubborn" Workers, Academics, and Women: Pakistani Women Academics' Identity Frameworks

• In Event: 35.037 - Contesting and Embodying Modernity/Islam: Education and Development Paradigms in Nigeria, Pakistan, Mali, and the United States

Abstract

Objectives:
Over the last decades, a global ‘epidemic’ of higher education reform, characterized by decentralization, privatization, private sector participation and a spread of competitive performativity, has swept the world. In this global context, women faculty in Pakistan must also deal with an intimidating array of social and familial responsibilities, gendered expectations, and body surveillance. This paper is based on qualitative research I conducted at a major women’s university in one of the largest cities in Pakistan. It shows how women faculty members of this institute juggle, resist, embrace and deploy educational reforms, local academic cultures and structures, international academic practices, societal expectations, family claims, and personal lives with amazing resiliency and grace.

Methods & Data:
I conducted participant-observation and informal conversational interviews with ten women academics at Women’s University while conducting faculty development there under the auspices of a government-financed program.

Theoretical framework:
While I view Pakistani women academics’ cultural production through an anthropological lens (Holland et al, 1998), a focus on resilience (Grant and Kinman, 2012; Rajan-Rankin 2013) sheds light on their identity strategies in work and personal settings. This theoretical lens is particularly useful for examining women faculty’s personal and professional identity formation and their construction of third space identities.

Results:
I find that while the work and choices of Pakistani women academics are structured by multiple external forces, yet they construct third spaces (Bhabha, 2004) of personal and professional freedom by strategic, creative, and cautious identity work. In doing so, Pakistani women academics are often characterized as ‘dheet’ (Urdu: stubborn) by campus leaders, administration, colleagues, and higher education reformers. Faculty frequently experienced overt authoritarian demands, and their creative and strategic choices enabled them to juggle their personal and professional lives. Faculty also struggled to fit Western styles and standards of work, teaching, research, and publication, though it was often clear that these standards were, to a great extent, a product of first world resources.

My respondents’ interviews intersect at the theme of resilience. Women faculty engage with multiple constructions of their work and their identity, and they work to reconstruct their identities in view of their many roles as women, mothers, daughters, wives, junior or senior faculty, researchers, and so on (Holland et al, 1998). In many ways they resist definitions of what it means to be Pakistani, a Pakistani woman, an academic worker, a teacher, a Muslim. They create third spaces of identity where they can combine notions that are regarded as binary oppositions. They also reconstruct what it means to be dheet or stubborn, so that this notion morphs into strategic resistance in the face of management and gendered struggles against control of women’s bodies.

Significance:
Pakistan is a critically important country in the global political context. There is a dearth of qualitative research literature on Pakistani higher education, which is in a state of considerable change. This paper engages with the intersections among gender, work, and development in Pakistan, shedding light on the real-life struggles of professional women.

Author

• Shabana Mir