Exploring the Development of Middle Eastern Women's Translingual Digital Identity

Abstract

This dissertation investigated the (re)construction of five Middle Eastern women’s (graduate students in the U.S.) Translingual Digital Identity (TDI) through transnational feminist, translanguaging and translingualism lenses. It adopted a qualitative research approach, specifically narrative inquiry to shed light on how Middle Eastern women develop a TDI in translanguaging digital spaces. As this research explored the TDI (re)construction of Middle Eastern women, the interpretations included analyzing their digital autoethnographies, interviews, and artifacts using two methods of analysis: Clandinin and Connelly’s (2020) three-dimensional space analysis and thematic analysis. The data showed that that three participants experience a significant identity growth through their translingual digital interactions on social media. On the other hand, two participants experience a slow steady identity development that involve everyday family communication, self-learning, and entertainment on social media. Three themes emerged from the participants’ data. Theme one illustrates the complexity and the fluidity of TDI which is developed through their engagement in diverse multimodal translanguaging digital interactions. These interactions promote the participants’ linguistic and cultural accessibility and intersectionality which contribute to (re)constructing their complex and fluid TDL. Theme two explains how the three participants develop their TDIs on social media through their agency as border crossers, their resistance to their sociocultural norms, and their awareness of their own translingual and digital interactions, and constantly reflecting on them. Another crucial theme that appeared in the data is translingual identity negotiation. All participants practice different strategies of translingual identity negotiation to enhance their translanguaging digital interactions and meaning-making process which contribute to (re)constructing their TDIs. Hence, the themes emerged from this study emphasize that, for some Middle Eastern women, digital translanguaging spaces are appropriate environments for (re)constructing a TDI that is characterized by fluidity, complexity, authenticity, and multimodality. The findings of this research shed light on how to be more mindful of inclusivity, that translingualism has not really included all different categories of individuals, their lived experiences, their language and identity. This is one avenue that could guide translingualism researchers and scholars to delve into terms of inclusivity of diverse communities. Several implications could be taken into consideration from the study findings. This dissertation offers some recommendations particularly to female scholars in the Middle East, a call to embrace the power of their lived experience on digital spaces. It also encourages composition and translingualism educators to cautiously integrate translingual digital strategies in their courses; and it invites college courses and workshops developers to reflect on Middle Eastern women’s TDIs. This research also offers some future research directions to explore the intersection of TDI and gender or sociocultural identity, and offline identity.