This paper investigates the discursive links between international students in the United States and suicide to understanding the liminal relationship of students of Asian and Middle Eastern descent and the U.S. Through an investigation of representations of the self-inflicted deaths of non-white international students in immigration policy and popular culture, this paper works to tease out the place of international students as exceptional inclusions in U.S. higher education and in the “American” national imaginary. These representations link to material concerns for individuals and institutions as students are imagined as essential for U.S. prosperity and threatening to U.S. security. Early reports from Virginia Tech in April 2007 assumed that Seung-Hui Cho, the then “unidentified Asian student” who fatally shot thirty-two people before killing himself, was a Pakistani Muslim international student. While this might seem arbitrary, the reports built on popular associations between international students and suicide, such as the widely covered 1991 incident in which Gang Lu, a Chinese post-graduate student at the University of Iowa, shot and killed five people before taking his own life. International students were linked to suicide when it was discovered that a man involved in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center entered the US on a student visa. This connection was furthered by findings that three of the participants in the September 11th 2001 suicide-hijackings entered the country on student visas. These links are not simply sensational. Though often under-acknowledged in the popular press, Asian international students represent a disturbing percentage of suicide attempts on U.S. college campuses, estimated by a Cornell University study at 63%. Building on the work of Talal Asad, Michel Foucault, and Stephania Pandalfo on race, suicide, and the nation-state, this paper considers the repercussions of the linkage of international students and suicide for US immigration policy and public perceptions of students from the Middle East and Asia. What are the effects of this perceived connection for U.S. immigration and visa law, higher education policy, and university administration? Specifically, if Asian and Middle Eastern international students are understood as at once essential for sustaining America’s place in the global economy and statistically the highest suicide risks, what means are in place to sort “properly” future oriented international students from those who are possibly suicidal or terroristic? How does this process both reflect ‘American’ liberal assumptions about personhood, mental health, and futurity attendant upon belonging in the US?

In the summer of 2007, I observed a leadership camp in Virginia that was held by Iranian Alliances Across Borders (IAAB) , a small grassroots organization for the Iranian-American community, empowering immigrant adolescents as future leaders in the United States. The summer camp employed Freirean pedagogy and theater techniques by Augusta Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed (1979) to practice dialog, build connections, and encourage the young participants to overcome the oppression they feel as immigrants. Observing such practices introduced me to Freirean practices and pedagogy. After reviewing Freire’s work I learned about his liberatory pedagogy of education, concept of dialog, and how this pedagogy tackles oppression by suggesting problem-posing and bottom-up strategies of knowledge making instead of authoritarian banking education. Inspired by the positive impacts of Freirean projects in different regions around the world, I went to Tehran, Iran in the summer of 2008 and conducted a one-week Freirean summer camp in collaboration with a team of Iranian and Iranian-American practitioners in order to create a liberatory space for adolescent girls to practice expression skills. Bartlett (2005) identifies that “understanding the meaning of dialog” and “transforming traditional teacher-student relations” (p. 345) are among the most challenging aspects of Freirean pedagogy for practitioners around the world. Examining Freirean approach in theory and practice, I use Bartlett’s (2005) study as a heuristic framework for the current study to portray how the practitioners in the summer camp understood the key concepts of Freirean pedagogy. In this study, I used portraiture methodology to draw a picture of the practitioners’ understanding and employment of Freirean pedagogy. Portraiture is a qualitative narrative inquiry methodology that paints individuals and their detailed and complex socio-historical contexts with words. Painting with participants’ words, the current study portrays how sociopolitical complexities of the society influence practitioners’ understanding and employing of a democratic pedagogy in theory and practice.

Factors influencing an increase in the U.S. study abroad population in the Middle East/North Africa Abstract In the fallout of the events of September 11, 2001, both the U.S. government and public have acknowledged an immediate need for a deepening of American understanding of the people, languages, and culture of the Middle East/North Africa (MENA). One significant way in which Americans have historically gained in-depth knowledge about this region has been through participation in Study Abroad (SA) programs. Within the first decade of this century the U.S. study abroad population in the MENA has grown by over 500%. There is little literature, however, addressing the influences on SA destination choice in general and almost none analyzing SA in the MENA region. The purpose of this study is to 1) describe American students who study in the Middle East/North Africa region and 2) assess the factors which cause some study abroad students to choose this less common region rather than a more common destination. In order to investigate the motivations, attitudes, and aspects of human capital which influence study abroad destination choice, this research examines seven main factors: exposure to international issues, attitudes about national security, career intentions, language exposure, previous international travel experience, risk propensity, and scholarship support. Data from a mixed-mode survey (both online and hard-copy) was collected from 601 SA students in the MENA region and elsewhere. In addition, nearly 80 SA students in the MENA region participated in focus groups which provided deeper insight into the process of destination choice. Quantitative and qualitative analysis of survey and focus group data has revealed some of the factors influencing this historical growth in SA in the MENA region. MENA students differed from their counterparts in Western Europe and Australia: they had more exposure to international issues, more language experience, more government scholarships, were more interested in employment with the U.S. government, and were more concerned about the national security of the United States. The use of a theoretical model which takes into account human capital, expectancy and student choice models has shown that multiple factors need to be considered in order to understand SA destination choice. Given the increasing trend in SA programs in MENA region, this analysis provides insight into the multitude of factors which are leading students to this area of the world.

“Half/Half”: The Experiences of Palestinian American Teens brought back “Home” for High School. Many Arabs living in Diaspora choose to send their children back to their homelands for high school. This is especially the case with Palestinians. This paper will outline some of the social and economic characteristics of American born Palestinians who were brought back to Palestine and Jordan as youth, describe the reasons parents gave for taking this step, and discuss the youths’ perceptions of these experiences. Data are from a sociological study conducted in 2011 that includes in-depth, structured interviews with more than 50 Arab American high school juniors and seniors living in the Ramallah and Amman areas. While the overwhelming majority reported that they were not happy at all about the decision to “go back,” differences in modes of adaptation and in visions of the future emerged from the interview data, some of which are gendered. Their diasporic imaginings of what they would find differed markedly from the reality they found, in both positive and negative ways, indicating ways in which the media shaped their views and not their parents or communities. Social media allow these youth to stay in touch with persons important to their lives back in the US, potentially rendering the social rupture less severe than was the case in prior decades. Data collection for this comparative study of transnational Arab American youth is occurring now.

In the context of the post-9/11 Bush government’s War on Terror, anthropologists paid much attention to the politics of religious education and growing extremism in Islamic seminaries (madrasas). However, the simplistic association of the subjectivities created through Islamic schooling with religious fundamentalism has somehow obscured anthropologists from the emergent and increasingly popular phenomenon of private Islamic schools (PIS) as alternative institutions of Islamic learning and the kinds of religious and social subjectivities they create. In this paper, I will base my discussion on PIS examples from Egypt and Pakistan. I will discuss the colonial legacies in the educational system of the countries and the ways in which various post-independence governments have defined Islamic practice and education to highlight how the PIS blend of modern secular and Islamic traditional education is responding to these factors. So far, Linda Herrera’s study is the primary resource on the contemporary private Islamic schooling trend in Egypt and will guide my discussion. With regard to Pakistan, the data on PIS for this paper will be extracted from my own participant-observation based long-term field research in Pakistan. Through my comparative study, I will stress the need for two approaches in ethnographic studies on Islamic schools: first, I will highlight how Islamic tradition and modern education is defined differently in every PIS in the two countries depending on the aspirations of the entrepreneurs and the pedagogical dynamic between the teachers and the students and their parents, and how this shows that different kinds of religious schooling create different kinds of subjectivities; second, I will discuss the social, economic and political reasons why middle and upper class citizens are opting for this form of religious education to argue that these schools are a conscious educational choice for their patrons because madrasa education does not satisfy all ideological, societal and professional demands. The popularity and dissemination of the private Islamic form of schooling in countries such as Egypt and Pakistan has set a new, alternative tradition of Islamic schooling that is allowing people to become active and modern citizens and to redefine and maintain continuity with their own traditions of Islamic education in the post-9/11 political environment. By doing a comparative discussion of the reasons for its popularity and its implications, I will point toward new avenues and manners of examining Islamic education and its resultant subjectivities.