Intersec[shun]ality

My Jackson Scholar mentor once told me that the way to take my disparate set of experiences and craft a narrative as a researcher is to always "bring it back to myself." Whether we are explicit about it or not, our work always has pieces of who we are within it. When I take on research projects, I'm seldom thinking about whether or not it will speak to the narrative that I am trying to weave together for the CV I hope to someday  🎤drop on a potential employer's desk. Instead, I mostly just try to follow what feels interesting, what I'm passionate about and, I suppose, subconsciously remain hopeful that my heap of instinctive decisions will later amount to a coherent story that depicts some ~accurate version of me.

However, when it came time for me to pitch myself at conferences or in grant applications, I had to dig deep to find that story. In an effort to take my mentor's advice, I looked at each of the projects I've been involved in to make sense of what part of them spoke to my identity. It is in this way that I identified the two strands of research I now distinguish as my focal areas: educational leadership for development in Africa and immigrant/non-immigrant education in the US. Both of these areas speak to the junction of privileged and oppressed cultural boundaries. (To "bring it back to myself", I'm an Ethiopian and a non-immigrant getting an education in the US.)

Of course, most PhD candidates don't quite operate this way and, as I'm learning now, it's with good reason.

I'm four years into my program and I'm finding myself grappling with things I thought I had figured out a long time ago. My dissertation is on transnational educational leadership within iNGOs working in Ethiopia. As I (literally) pedal through my interview data, slugging along the transcription of colorful conversations with my generous informants in iNGO offices in Ethiopia,  I am reminded of my internal conflict during my fieldwork: a conflict between my membership to the world of Ethiopians and my membership to the world of African diaspora/[non]immigrants in the US.

My study sites were extremely welcoming climates for me and quickly felt like home; however, there were many moments that were sure reminders of the distance that my [physical] return to my home country had not been able to diminish. I remember that one time they introduced me in a classroom as "the American-educated PhD candidate." I can tell from the pride in their voice that they mean to heighten the excitement around my presence but it also almost always served to break the sense of belonging that had been building in me, by othering me. My entire data collection process was riddled by the divergence of my perceptions of my place in Ethiopia from how Ethiopia felt about me.

Photo Credit: ww2.kqed.org

Lately, I've been caught between yet another pair of distinct worlds--one which tokenizes my participation in the race and immigration discourse as an African woman and the other which deems my diasporic sensibilities as not being African enough. A man once told me that African immigrants [should be] concerned with the plight of Africans and not the plight of Black people. His inability to reconcile the two worlds was truly staggering. There are so many moments like this that have forced me to take a stand on issues I hadn't previously thought deeply about. I'm suspended between worlds that see me as either Black, [non]immigrant, African, or Ethiopian, separately--unable to accept that an allegiance to one is not an abandonment of the other. While the world(s) stay(s) busy trying to tell me who I am, I'm grasping for pieces of myself that are familiar to me. I can't fit into any of the categories my conversations box me into.

A few days ago, my advisor reminded me that my lack of full access to any world has in some sense provided me with unique access to many worlds. Anthropologists refer to this as insider/outsider status. The idea is that by having one foot in two worlds, we're able to gain perspective of each without taking any nuances for granted in either. Insider status may give us full access to a world but can make us so close to things in that world that we become blind to that which we take for granted; whereas outsider status may mean having no access to another's world but can also provide the distance needed to recognize what is taken for granted by members of that world.

But how do we get inside or outside of a world? What determines membership to worlds like Black, [non]Immigrant, or African? Is there a common understanding by each member as to what this is? Or does each individual understand their membership differently? I'm leaning towards the latter. Take the world of "women" for example. You may argue that there is a biological requirement for membership into this world but the term "woman" may mean different things to each of us who identify as such. So I wonder then, if I can use this as a starting point to find comfort in my intersec[shun]ality.

Society will assert whether we are insiders or outsiders of any given world but perhaps the truth is that we each comprise of our own.