“They Expect You to Be a Superhuman”: Somali Diasporic Women, State-Sanctioned Motherhood, and Schooling

• In Event: Scholars of Color Imagining Educational Research as Reparation for U.S. Imperialism

Abstract

This critical phenomenology research (Weiss et al., 2019) explores the experiences of motherhood of 12 Somali women of first, second, and 1.5-generation immigrants in two working-class communities in the United Kingdom and the United States. Specifically, it examines how Somali women’s conception of motherhood differs between first and 1.5/second generations in their relationship with schooling. In the educational literature, current conceptions of school-community relations, which shape women’s experiences, are mostly based on a Western understanding of family dynamics and organization that perpetuates academic imperialism, even when we consider critical research that seeks to center the voices and experiences of communities of Color (Green, 2017; Ishimaru, 2013). This paper argues that if we are to address the persistent marginalization that working-class communities of Color experience in school, we need to center those communities’ epistemologies in our research and practice as an anti-imperialist endeavor. In this paper, I put Black and African feminist thought (Collins, 2009; Oyěwùmí, 2016) in conversation with the phenomenology of race (Fanon, 2008; Weheliye, 2014) and gender (Lugones, 2010) to understand how historical backdrops of race and gender complicate theorizing the institution of BIPOC motherhood.

This research is part of a larger study that examined the school experiences of Somali parents and students. Focus group interviews explored: a) the participants’ experiences and relationships with their children’s school, and b) how they navigated motherhood in their families, communities, and societies. While the Somali mothers’ experiences differed contextually between the United Kingdom and the United States, two common themes emerged from the analysis that a) reflect school practices as coercive tools to assimilate immigrant mothers of Color, and b) demonstrate the collective work mothers of Color engage in their effort to navigate and resist such coercion through community building. In highlighting the various ways that the participants negotiate different ideologies of motherhood in relation to the state, family, and community, this study argues that state-sanctioned motherhood is part of the imperial project of the United Kingdom and the United States and the Somali mothers’ maternal practices of care rooted in communal epistemologies function as an anti-imperialist subversive act. This paper significantly unsettles Western-centric notions of motherhood and positions transnational critique of motherhood as a possibility of redressing British and U.S. imperialism.

Author

• Nimo Abdi, The Ohio State University