The Digital “Homescape” of Community Building by and for West African Graduate Student-Mothers

• In Event: Embodying Collective Care and Holistic Educational Attainment of Graduate Student Mothers of Color in a Digital Society

Proposal

Relevance
This phenomenological study examines four first-generation West African graduate student mothers’ experiences within the US, Canada, and Spain’s higher education system. It details how they use digital space to create a community of support that serves as their homescape. The study advances transformative and collective (m)othering experiences and scholarship for first-generation students and women attaining higher education abroad to center their unheard voices. It captures a model of authentic care in a digital space, incorporating interpersonal care and emphasizing these women’s dynamic interplay of familial, intellectual, and critical care. Through shared stories, the women enacted authentic care, nourishing their body and mind-spirits and promoting their academic and civic engagement as mothers, wives, and students.
Relevance
In response to the CIES call on envisioning education in a digital society, this paper highlights the unheard voices of four first-generation black West African international graduate mother-scholars who created a digital homescape to discuss strategies to navigate parenting and their graduate education. Extant literature on homescapes has focused on different layouts in the home and beyond among transmigrant families to examine the identity construction (Boivin, 2021; Tompkins, 2001) and create a thriving space for self. This study widens the frame of homescapes to examine how social media serves as a graduate student-parents “homescape.”


Theoretical Grounding
This study draws first on Crenshaw’s (2013) intersection theory to examine the identities of race, gender, culture, and societal underpinnings of women. The second is Ọmọlúwàbí, a Yorùbá philosophy that captures the essence of communality and valuing relationships to promote everyone’s development and well-being (Falola, 2022). Ọmọlúwàbí shares in his reservoir of good behavior and demonstrates humane qualities encompassing honesty, hard-work, courage, and consideration for others (Abimbola, 1975; Falola, 2022). The four women in this study created a digital homescape for a community of support while having strategic conversations on courageously advocating for themselves as mothers and students through intimate activism (Tironi, 2018).
Inquiry
I used a snowball approach to recruit participants who I engaged in two individual conversations, a Focus Group Discussion, and artifacts analysis. Specifically, this study answers the following question:
How do West African international women navigate grad school and parenting (in a different country)?
What is the role of digital space in West African graduate-student-mothers’ community building?


Findings
Through thematic analysis, the preliminary findings reveal mothers’ intimate activism (Tironi, 2022) to create a space for care and subtle advocacy for themselves. Another finding demonstrates that policies and arrangements that place the distribution of material, social, and academic resources on students’ ability to network in unequal social environments often burden the African graduate-student-mothers. However, with their homescape, they prioritize care and still thrive as humans.


Contribution:
This paper contributes to the study of thriving as mothers, Africans, and students in higher institutions of learning abroad. It complicates assumptions of international student identity as ‘fixed’ and bound to an unchanging culture by illustrating the intentional, culturally sustaining practices undertaken. This study also reveals mother-scholars’ intentional efforts as an asset rather than viewing mothering as deficit.

Author

• Yetunde S Alabede, Michigan State University