Document Type : Research Paper

Author

Department of Sociology, Faculty of Economics, Management and Social Sciences, Shiraz University, Shiraz, Iran.

Abstract

The current research aims to phenomenologically understand how the girls living in border lines face life after graduation. It uses girls' experiences as a basis for the situation analysis of graduates in border regions to analyze the multiple determinants of their marginal, gender, and educational status. Becuse of their inferior status, which can be due to gender discrimination, or/and their being border residents, or/and being an ethnic and religious minority, they have considered graduation as the only way out of the multiple intersections of inequality they face in life. The current research has discussed this subject with the graduating border-living girls to discover whether higher education has led them to improve their status. Therefore, the lived experience of female graduates of public universities has been studied in four dimensions: lived body, lived time, lived space, and lived human relationships after graduation. It  attempts to restore the voice and position of girls as subordinates in graduation status in a borderline, gender, and educational situation. For this, Max Van Manen's hermeneutic and methodological approach has been applied to interpret and analyze the experiences of 30 female graduates in various fields of public universities in rural and urban border areas of Marivan, Sarovabad, and Baneh. Considering that the narratives of university the border-living graduated girls are studies, a hermeneutic theoretical basis is adopted and mega-narratives, on the one hand, and rejecting pre-existing assumptions, are avoided. In this research, hermeneutic phenomenology (interpretation) with emphasis on Max Van Manen's perspective and technique is applied to acquire the lived experiences of female graduates. According to van Manen, harmonic phenomenology provides a systematic approach to studying and interpreting a phenomenon, and it also allows the phenomenon to be analyzed and discovered with an interpretative point of view so that the researcher can gain a deeper understanding during the interpretation process. The results showed that the interviewees' understanding of their bodies is indicative of a worn-out body, caused by the entry into higher education and the borderline situation. Girls experience time in the forms of stress and social suffering, and they perceive border space after graduation as an unsafe and unstable space. Themes indicate the idea of discerning time as understanding the suffering of exclusion and marginalization from development and politics. The subject-border situation has created an environment for female graduates that is insecure and unstable. A space born from the frontier position, the position of femininity, the position of graduation. This space has influenced and shaped both the body and time. The chain of dimensions was completed with the description and analysis of human relations lived in the border situation. In such a way that they put human relationships after graduation in a borderline position with contradictory relationships. Relationships that were formed by disconnecting from the previous position and entering the university, and then returning to the borderline position due to rejection in the work and job process, lack of re-creation of a better position and position. They also interpret human relationships in the form of contradictory relationships, which indicate a break from the relationships before and after the graduates, relationships that are unstable and experienced as interruptions. Therefore, although they have not been able to change their position by graduating, they have found a deep understanding of it, which indicates questioning the role of higher education in the change of women in border areas. The discussion of marginalized subjects due to being in a borderline position and being a woman has been this research's theoretical, experimental, and methodological position. The discussion of the life world of female graduates living in the border areas of Kurdistan province, who are in multiple intersections of subjugation, brings us to the multidimensionality and multifacetedness of their views, critiques, and situational pluralism. Discovering the multi-layered nature of their subordinate position - the layer of location (bordering), time position (graduate in the current state of the higher education system), ethnic position (being Kurdish), religious position (being Sunni), and more importantly, gender position (female) Being a girl) is one of the results of this research.

Keywords

Main Subjects

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