Exploring Complex and Hybrid Identities Within U.S. Schools: The Afghan American Experience

• In Event: Roundtable Session 6
  In Roundtable Session: Protracted Refugee Situations and Public Scholarship for Democratic Education

Abstract

According to Stuart Hall and others, identity is dynamic, iterative, and context sensitive; yet, too often, teachers and other public school authorities perceive identity as fixed, static, and tied to concrete markers (Nguyen, 2010; Gutierrez & Rogoff, 2003). In fact, schools are “contested terrains” (Deyhle, 1991) and sites of “political struggle” (Ngyen, 2010; Apple, 2004) as their processes naturalize and legitimate particular “correct” identities (Barthes, 1972; Bourdieu, 1991) through discursive mechanisms and structural logics such as meritocracy, scarcity, deficit thinking, and hierarchical and scientific expertise (Foucault, 1977). These discourses or “technologies of power” (Foucault, 1977) “other” non-dominant students based on “ political, territorial, ethnic, and ideological disputes” (AERA 2016 Annual Meeting theme), thus hindering students’ capacity for critical thinking and civic engagement (Ali, 2014). This study illuminates the role of discursive mechanisms in the performativity of identity (Youdell, 2009) among Afghan-American Muslim youth, and addresses AERA’s annual meeting’s concern with social problems that undermine public schools’ reputation as “society’s most democratic institution.”
This study takes a mixed methods “hybrid” approach that includes interviews, surveys and identity-maps (Fine & Sirin, 2007), and seeks to understand how Afghan-American students experience their identities within US schools given the socio-political context post-9/11 (i.e. globalization, anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant discourses) that impose deficit (Bradbury, 2013), dangerous (Ali, 2014a & 2014b; Abu El-Haj, 2010) and foreign identities (Jaffe-Walter, 2013) on non-dominant American youth. Afghan-American, Muslim college students and recent high school graduates, who identify as refugees or the children of refugees, participate in this study to examine whether Afghan-Americans share similar experiences of being "othered" by state discourses that are taken up and perpetuated by schools. Based on previous literature on the Muslim-American experience (Maira, 2004; Abu El-Haj, 2007 & 2010; Ghaffer-Kucher, 2011; Bradbury, 2013; Jaffe-Walter, 2013; Ali, 2014a & 2014b), I propose many Afghan-American Muslim students experience hybrid identities that affect their cultural citizenship and sense of belonging (Abu El-Haj, 2010; Ali, 2014a), academic experiences (Ghaffar-Kucher, 2011; Bradbury, 2013) and religious identity within US schools.
This study of “hybridity”, even while concentrating on the ways that the current schooling contexts and broader social discourses influence Afghan-American identity, has promise of illuminating pathways toward improving the schooling experiences of all youth. According to Lewellen 2002 (as cited in Nguyen, 2010, p.161) increased globalization will likely lead to more “local and regional adaptations and resistances” rather than a homogenous globalized identity, thus making hybrid identities among youth more widespread. As a result, this exploration of Afghan-American schooling experiences will contribute toward understanding (1) Muslim-American youth identity construction, post 9/11 (2) adoptions and contestations of discursive mechanisms within schooling that construct and position the “other” (3) and hybridized/hyphenated identities within a globalized society.

Author

• Saugher Nojan, University of California - Santa Cruz