Narratives of Becoming: Saudi Women's Self-formation in the Space of International Student Mobility

Abstract

For decades, international student mobility has fostered individual and social change through the production of a cosmopolitan global elite, yet few studies have closely examined the nuances of international student self-formation or the ways in which dominant discourses of who they are and who they can be influence the process. To interrogate these issues and make visible the relations of power constituting the space of international student mobility, this dissertation focuses on the self-formation of Saudi Arabian women international students on higher education scholarships in the United States. Using a narrative inquiry methodology and poststructural feminist listening guide analysis, I draw on repeat, in-depth interviews with four Saudi women students to explore how they make sense of themselves and their experiences in relation to the material and discursive components of their international student mobility. Grounded in Deleuze’s concepts of becoming and assemblage in connection with a poststructural feminist reading of agency, I advance three primary arguments. First, I affirm international student subjectivity as a process of becoming rather than being, arguing that Saudi women students’ identities are neither singular nor fixed, but instead always in flux. Second, I contend that international student mobility for Saudi women is a spatial assemblage which both shapes their interactions and is shaped by the self-formation, agency, and geopolitical relations linked to their mobility. Third, I locate Saudi women students’ agency in their naming of the discourses that would bind them, their re-negotiation of self within and against those discourses, and the fleeting lines of flight they traverse to go beyond them. Woven throughout the dissertation and these arguments is a critique of global higher education as productive of neoliberal, individualized subjects and a call to re-configure international student mobility as a space that looks beyond essentializing categorizations or habitual trajectories of student self-formation and allows for openness to the not-yet-known.