Trespassing with Fear: Duo Ethnographic Story Sessions at the Crossroads of Language, Religion, and Immigration in Educational Research

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Wednesday 1:45 pm
  In Roundtable Session: Decolonizing Research Methodology In Education

Abstract

As two immigrant women from Syria and Germany, we explore the intimacies of fear, language, religion, and politics through our friendship and conversations about our separate research studies and lives as immigrants in the U.S. We highlight how a duo-ethnographic approach to qualitative inquiry provided methodological hope during times of heightened fear and anti-immigration rhetoric, which is anti-Muslim, anti-Black, and anti-Arab. Our first study involves Arab immigrant women’s educational experiences from a transnational Arab feminist perspective, while the second focuses on Black immigrant women from a transnational Black feminist approach. Through multi-layered duo-ethnography, we show how our research stories interconnect, capturing the intimacies of lived experiences that are rife with systemically imposed fear.

Authors

• Youmna Deiri, Texas A&M International University

• Tanja Burkhard, Georgia State University