"Am I fractured or whole?": Exploring Central Asian female students' self-identity in American graduate schools

• In Event: Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Round-Table Session (English): Journeys, narratives and identities of international students

Proposal

The purpose of this qualitative study is to understand whether and how Central Asian female students’ identities change because of their studies in American higher education and cross-cultural encounters. Using a basic interpretive approach, I interviewed six female students from five countries of Central Asia: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan. My research puts women’s identity formation in a historical perspective in order to contextualize how their gender, ethnic, religious, national, and linguistic identities have been affected by the construction of the Soviet system. This offers some insight into who the female students were before coming to the United States and some of the challenges women face while defining their identities and coming to grips with their identity changes.
The research study is based on three strands of theoretical scholarship: Reconceptualized Model of Multiple Dimensions of Identity (Abes, Jones, & McEwen, 2007), the Affective, Behavioral, and Cognitive Model of Culture Shock (Ward, Bochner, & Furnham, 2001), and the transnational feminist perspective (Grewal & Kaplan, 1994). By using these theories, I portray women’s identity construction as a snapshot in time, that is, after living and studying in the United States more than two years and provide insights on how the process of crossing cultures makes a difference in women’s lives. I also explain that the changes female students experience in the United States may not be similar to identity changes from Western cultures.
I employed the basic interpretive approach for the research design and methods to uncover meaning from the perspectives of Central Asian female students (Bogdan & Biklen, 2003). By using a constant comparative method, I interpreted their cross-cultural and educational experiences, learned how they construct their self-identity, and discovered what meaning they attribute to studying and living abroad (Merriam, 2002).
The findings of this study are divided into three sections. First section focuses on the female students’ self-understandings after studying in the United States and explores how students’ gender identity is more salient than other identities. The issues of relationality and independence, which compose the student’s core sense of self, are also addressed. The next section focuses on the processes of students’ identity transformation and the key influencing factors that are related to informal education and formal schooling. One of the themes in this section is about female students’ changed views on sex, romantic relationships, and marriage. The final section elaborates on how female students negotiate their self-identity with all its complexities. The students express their negotiations with the psychological disturbance in terms of feeling incomplete, fractured, and a desire to find where they feel psychologically ‘at-home’.
The research concludes by suggesting that universities should not view students’ identity change as a pathology, but to understand the sense of in-betweenness and accept this complexity that is still in process.

Author

• Maya Satlykgylyjova, Kent State University