Gendered Spaces in Education: Between Modernity and Tradition

• In Event: 52.037 - Islam, Gender, and Education: (De)Constructing Tradition and Modernity in the United Arab Emirates, Pakistan, and India

Abstract

Objectives
This paper examines the types and dynamics of gendered spaces in a single-gender higher education context. It is based on a unique ethnographic inquiry conducted in a government university at the United Arab Emirates where Emirati female students are spatially segregated from other male students. The paper examines how these gendered spaces are imagined and constructed by the students through mobilizing particular discourses of modernity and tradition.

Theoretical Framework
Emirati society in its newly developed young state has largely kept its conservative nature, which are rooted in the region’s Islamic, societal and tribal traditions, despite development, modernization, increased wealth and life style changes. The higher education institute context that this study focuses on also mirrors several aspects of Emirati society, representing, therefore, a microcosm of the UAE’s multicultural larger society with all its tensions, hierarchies, gender dynamics as well as possibilities and constrains. In order to study student’s construction of gendered spaces and daily spatial practices, this paper utilizes Lefebvre’ s (1991) triad of perceived, conceived and lived as a theoretical framework. Gendered spaces are designed for and associated with one specific gender, and the gendering of space and place in each society reflects and is affected by the way gender is constructed in that particular society.

Methods & Data
This ethnographic research involved studying the university campus as a case, focusing on one specific issue, namely Emirati female students’ spatio-learning experiences. I applied multiple levels of data gathering and analysis to satisfy the multidimensionality (personal, social, cultural and academic) of the students’ spatial experiences. This required simultaneously adopting multiple roles during on-campus fieldwork (observing, interviewing, teaching and auditing classes), and also utilizing my unique position as both insider and outsider researching my own work environment.

Results
The findings of this study revealed three unique types of gendered spaces and the dynamics associated with such spaces as an important part of students’ lived spaces. These three types included: ‘generally’, ‘absolutely’ and ‘conditionally’ gendered spaces. The analysis reveals how gender, class, race, culture, modernity and tradition intersected with institutional context to inform the spatial realty and the dynamics of such gendered space. In such institutional context, female students’ agency became evident through their individual attempts at contesting these imposed boundaries and negotiating new ones within institutional, cultural and gender constraints, which allowed them to emerge as powerful women despite their lack of success in gaining more spatial mobility.

Significance
This study examines how the institutional contexts that emphasize modernization while also aiming to maintain the “traditional” aspects of local culture are translated into gendered spaces as well as lived experiences of the students. Emirati female students, thus, feel caught between their attraction to modernity and westernization while trying to remain anchored to their Arab-Islamic culture. This is clearly reflected in the dynamics associated with the emerging gendered spaces, including spatial restrictions, institutional surveillance exercised over students’ spatial mobility and agency.

References
Lefebvre, Henri. 1991 The Production of Space, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing (English Translation). First published in French in 1974 by Editions Anthropos.

Author

• Gergana Al Zeer, Zayed University