"Ethnicity Without Ethnicity": Educational Biographies and (new)Ethnic Identity

• In Event: Roundtable Session 21
  In Roundtable Session: Contemplating Questions of Home and Ethnicity

Abstract

This study suggests examining how graduates from a specific educational institution in Israel (“The Boarding School for the Gifted Disadvantaged) integrate their educational experience into specific “educational biographies.” Since the students’ ethnic identity lies at the foundation of the organizational identity-work, I ask how the graduates relate to their ethnic identity. The findings expose how the graduates translated the educational-organizational narrative into a unique ethnic identity: ethnicity without ethnicity. Ethnicity without ethnicity is an identity in which the individual reminds himself/herself that s/he is not ethnic, or that at least s/he is “beyond that [ethnic] story.” At the same time, I claim that the existence of these reminders is a type of practice that maintains ethnic identity.

Author

• Avihu Shoshana, University of Haifa