Belonging in Troubling Times: Considerations from the Vantage Point of Arab American Immigrant Youth

Abstract

This chapter examines how the perspectives and experiences of Arab American youth from immigrant communities challenge dominant models of citizenship – models that rely on the development of primary affective affiliation with the nation-state in which they reside. Contemporary processes of globalization have changed the nature of migration in ways that allow more and more people to sustain affective, economic, sociocultural, and political affiliations with multiple nations across the generations. These new facts on the ground make belonging and citizenship a complex affair for many young people whose lives play out across transnational fields. Listening closely to the perspectives and experiences of Arab American youth from immigrant communities illustrates new possibilities for conceptualizing education to account for the changing meaning of citizenship and belonging in these times.

A multi-site ethnography with Arab American youth from immigrant communities illustrates the ways that these young people lay claim to transnational forms of belonging that help them to mobilize economic, political, and social rights across international borders, even as they encounter a complex and nuanced set of ideologies and practices that position them outside the US national imaginary. This research tracks a different set of questions than those that have dominated the debates on US immigrant education. In concert with a growing field of scholarship, this research calls into question the dominant assimilation-accommodation framework for it implicitly takes the nation-state as the boundary for our investigations (Harvard Educational Review, 77(3), 285–316, 2007; Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 40(1), 1–19, 2009; Hall 2004; Lukose 2009; Maira 2009). Shifting from a focus on the category of immigrant, this chapter attends to the ways in which contemporary processes of globalization and migration lead many young people to forge a sense of belonging and citizenship across transnational fields.

This move opens up new pathways for inquiry. Rather than exploring how young people navigate between cultural norms, values, and beliefs they learn in their homes and communities, and those they encounter in schools, this framework suggests that young people are producing multifaceted practices that creatively respond to the transnational spaces across which their lives unfold. Thus, this framework moves away from seeing youth as negotiating between cultural identities to thinking about how they develop discourses and practices of belonging and citizenship across transnational fields. This perspective takes seriously the notion that young people are actively creating new ways of enacting belonging and engaging in citizenship practices – practices at odds with dominant models based around the borders of the nation-state. This chapter concludes with implications for educational programs and practices.