Sojourners navigating structural constraints: international student spouses learning English in an informal centre

ABSTRACT

Women accompanying their husbands to pursue graduate degrees abroad inhabit complex social locations that have economic, social, and personal implications. This paper draws from a broader study of literacy practices in an informal university centre to focus on the gendered structural constraints and experiences of sojourners to the United States, who as ‘good spouses’ accompany their husbands to pursue the educational promise of the Global North, leaving their native languages, cultures, social networks, and occupations behind. Some spouses experience a psychic, temporal, and geographic state of ‘idleness’ as they wait for their husbands to fulfil educational and professional commitments. Informal educational centres serve as vital generative spaces of possibility and comfort to cultivate agency and community through social interaction and language learning. Yet such potential operates only within constraints, as sojourners’ mobility and hopes remain linked to their position as dependents and their lack of social capital in the host country.

KEYWORDS:

• Gendered idleness
• literacy
• secondary positionality
• agency
• sojourners

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Soha Elfeel is the Academic Coordinator and ESL instructor at the English Language Institute at Oklahoma State University. She holds a doctoral degree in professional education studies from Oklahoma State University, with an emphasis on teaching English as a second language. Her research interests are: academic writing and reading, culturally-responsive pedagogy, the sociocultural aspects of language learning, particularly the intersection of literacy, language, and culture in teaching English as a second language.

Lucy E. Bailey is an associate professor of Social Foundations and Qualitative Inquiry and the Director of Gender and Women’s Studies at Oklahoma State University. Her specialisation areas include the theoretical foundations of inquiry and a range of non-positivist qualitative research approaches, particularly those that work ‘with rather than on’ people. Her scholarship draws from interdisciplinary theoretical approaches to examine both current diversity issues and educational history.

Notes

1 This manuscript draws from Elfeel’s (2014) unpublished dissertation, and early analysis in Elfeel & Bailey (2015).