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Highlighted Session: Being/Becoming a Par/Desi (i): Making Sense of Higher Education as Borderlands

Wed, March 26, 1:15 to 2:30pm, Palmer House, Floor: 3rd Floor, Salon 2

Group Submission Type: Highlighted Paper Session

Proposal

The contemporary digital age has enabled institutions, communities, and individuals from different geographical and social locations to connect in new and hybrid ways. At the same time, this digital age continues to reinforce traditional hierarchies whether it is related to identity markers such as nationality, race, and gender among others or the dominance of Western institutional and cultural norms being the standard for institutional efficiency in the so-called developing countries. In this context, this panel critically engages with how higher education institutions in the US and South Asian contexts become borderlands (Anzaldua, 2021) to construct, perform, and reproduce racialized identities in this digital age with its promise of instant connectivity. The presenters employ Bhattacharya’s Par/Des(i) framework (2019) to engage with their Desi/South Asian identity markers to examine and explore the relevance, ambiguity, and power of race as a category shaping the politics of representation in higher education institutions. Through focusing on their own lived experiences within higher education institutions in the US and different South Asian contexts, they explore the marginalization and privilege associated with being South Asians/Desis even when this category means and implies different things in different educational institutions/contexts.
To consider the complexity of being South Asian/Desi, the presenters in this panel employ Bhattacharya’s Par/Desi(i) framework to relationally engage with the ambiguity and tensions inherent in their transnational identities through being in community with each other (Bhattacharya, 2019). Critical race scholars show how communities, such as immigrants, diaspora, and international students among others, that move to the US become intelligible to the larger US society through their placement in these race-based categories (Cho, Crenshaw, & McCall, 2013; Ladson-Billings, 2022). Despite becoming critical to claim recognition and rights for minoritized communities in the US, such race-based categorization does not always capture the identities and lived experiences of many of these groups. In addition, these categories conflate the within group differences for racialized groups such as South Asians and LatinX among others. In this context, the Par/Des(i) framework becomes a lens to explore the power as well as the instability and tentativeness of this specific identity category.
Through employing the Par/Desi(i) framework, the presenters focus on the movements between different educational spaces in the US and in different South Asian contexts that assign them identities such as immigrants, people of color, South Asians, diaspora, and students among others. This relational approach to the Par/Desi(i) framework is employed not only to highlight the tentativeness and ambiguity of the Par/Desi(i) identities but also to create a dialogic community where the presenters are engaging with their and others’ lived experiences. The presenters, thus, explore their lived experiences through mobilizing particular modalities of comparison grounded in relationality, dialogue, and community building in efforts to challenge reproduction of hierarchies, an approach that we call relational comparison. Employing relational comparison, the presenters examine how the category of their identity is employed, performed, and challenged within the US and South Asian higher education systems.
In paper 1, the authors employ Bhattacharya’s (2019) Par/Desi(i) framework (2019) to provide a conceptual and methodological framework to facilitate the creation of a dialogic community of scholars of South Asian origin to comparatively analyze their identities and experiences as fluid, tentative, in-making, and contextual. In paper 2, the authors critically engage with the (re)production of their “Muslim Par/Desi(i)” identities as international students from Pakistan and India through approaching the US higher education system as borderlands. In paper 3, the authors approach their Par/Desi(i) identities through focusing on the politics of caste in shaping the Hindu identities in the Nepali, Indian, and US higher education systems. In paper 4, the authors employ the Par/Desi(i) framework to engage with the splits in their collective and individual identities as “Indians” to reflect on the privileges and marginalizations that are associated with this hybrid racialized identity in the US higher education system.
Grounded in the Par/Desi(i) framework (Bhattacharya, 2019), this panel conceptualizes and applies a comparative approach that engages with and captures the hybridity, tentativeness, and complexity of lived experiences shaped by formal educational institutions in different national, geographical, and cultural contexts. In addition, it also facilitates an analysis of educational institutions as borderlands that shape the processes and structures that simultaneously produce inclusions as well as exclusions for certain racialized groups like South Asians.
We argue that this approach is particularly productive for the field of Comparative and International Education that tends to rely heavily on the concepts, frameworks, and policies focusing on comparison. It challenges the dominant framing of comparison that positions identities, experiences, processes, and cultures as static and existing in binaries. Through creating a dialogic and collaborative community of scholars with South Asian origin, this relational comparative approach aims to disrupt the employment of West as the invisible frame of reference of comparison that often conflates the diversity that exists within and across different South Asian communities.

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