Meetoo, V; (2016) The identities of South Asian girls in a multicultural school context: constructions, negotiations and constraints. Doctoral thesis , UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This thesis explores the identities of South Asian girls in relation to the multicultural backdrop of one mixed sex inner-city state secondary school. It interrogates how the girls constructed, negotiated and contested their social identities within the school’s approach to managing diversity through discourses of ‘everyday’ multiculturalism. The research constituted a three-year case study consisting of in-depth interviews to explore the perspectives of nine teachers who were involved with the Ethnic Minority Achievement and Inclusion departments, and nine ‘South Asian’ 15-16 year old girls, mainly first generation migrants from the Indian sub-continent and Sri Lanka, Mauritius and Afghanistan. An intersectional approach was employed to investigate the ways in which the girls, as racialized and gendered subjects are socially positioned by teachers and position themselves in the school’s multicultural context. The findings illuminate the ways in which multiculturalism was a contested ‘top down’ policy response to diversity, but also an ‘everyday’ reality, evident in teachers’ varied enactments of ‘everyday’ multiculturalism and the girls’ daily negotiations of diversity. An analytic focus on ‘everyday’ multiculturalism was crucial in providing an understanding of how teachers positioned the girls and the girls positioned themselves. Findings specifically highlight how racialized and gendered identities in ‘everyday’ multiculturalism were shifting and transformative. Yet, since essentialised versions of culture were reproduced in ‘everyday’ multiculturalism, the girls negotiated and navigated identities that were also constraining and hierarchical, particularly in dominant discourses of ‘Asian’ girls, forced marriage and ‘between two cultures’. These findings have implications for policy and practice in teacher education in terms of the need to institutionalize a more complex multicultural approach in which issues of cultural racism can be openly addressed.

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