Page 98-99 of my dissertation is the introduction to the fourth chapter of my dissertation. In this chapter, I organize my analysis on specific ‘encounters’, or instantiations of contact zones as part of my method to reframe migration processes as mobility. In so doing, my work broadens anthropological scholarship about how migration as mobility connects with gendered academic aspirations and culture-making for Pakistani Muslim youth, specifically focusing on education-driven migration.

During the first few weeks at the Pakistani college campus, the scholarship students, those moving from rural areas to the posh, manicured college campus in Lahore, experienced numerous moments of culture shock. Similarly, the journey from more conservative and Muslim-practicing home environments in the outer boroughs of New York City to NYPC’s Manhattan college campus entailed a similar kind of culture shock, particularly as students ‘carry’ with them mobility imaginaries from beyond the place-bound context. To ethnographically frame these moments of cultural shock/encounter, I refer to Pratt’s concept of “contact zones” to demarcate “social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination” (1992:4). Contact zones are conceptualized to understand unequal relations of power between populations. For the students in Lahore, their geographical locations of origin are positioned on the peripheries of the Pakistani state, often from areas that have experienced the weight of the war against terrorism or from rural villages that do not benefit from the state’s urban development programs and policies. For students in NYC, their immigrant status and Pakistani cultural heritage contrasted with the American public city college they attended. Moreover, as students on financial aid, their material conditions poise them as less economically privileged than their upper middle class peers. Their socioeconomic status also determines their schooling background, their family histories, and several other indices that may heighten a sense of asymmetrical social relations. By considering an ethnography of encounters – here encounters with a cosmopolitan, urban set of imaginaries – we can extend our understanding of how unequal power dynamics interactively shape culture-making across sites of difference (Faier and Rofel 2014).

In this chapter, I discuss an incident of ethnic-based harassment faced by a participant on the Lahore campus. Pashtun freshmen students frequently are seen as minority students and can be identified based on their use of Pashto and/or sartorial choices and mannerisms. In this incident, Zahid’s experience of ethnic- based harassment offers an example of the more problematic encounters that can occur where the ethno-linguistic category of ‘Pashtun’ carries an additional set of identity categories, such as less urban and less cosmopolitan. While these students are physically mobile and have moved to Lahore, the stereotypic social personae of the Pashtun student compared to the Karachi-origin urban student can create social barriers that inhibit interpersonal mobility and communicative exchanges. These kinds of contact zones highlight the rural and urban (imagined) social types that are still very much observable. The more valuable or privileged social persona of Karachi-origin students often raise class-based anxieties for the Pashto-speaking youth, and vice versa Karachi-origin students, who might very well have their own village-to-city migration, are keen to highlight their cosmopolitanism. Similarly in NYC, I track Muslim student narratives about facing racially motivated encounters which have become especially worrisome in the last few years as anti-Muslim racism increased in the America. Other vignettes in this chapter follow such stories of encounter and how the diverse student populations in Lahore and New York City interpret these moments, manage their emerging identities in relation to structural power inequities that often marginalize migrant youth within and post-college, and negotiate difference and community-building in their respective urban locales.

My larger project argues that the rural to urban migration pattern and concomitant social imaginaries remained significant for both intra- and inter-national movements, here focused on the college campus as the primary contact zone. Through student narratives regarding their mobility aspirations, I analyze emergent and locale-specific discursive and embodied practices in relation to transnational, gendered, and piety-based markers of belonging. In this, I found that these practices often reified and critiqued traditional and modern forms of patriarchy. This study shows that how migration is but one part of larger subject-making processes observable among Pakistani-origin Muslim youth, allowing a deeper understanding of how transnational Muslim youth re-fashion their social identities and professional aspirations in the contemporary political and social climate.

Durrani, Mariam. 2016. A Study on Mobility: Pakistani-origin Muslim Youth in Higher Education. Phd dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.

Works Cited

Faier & Rofel. (2014). Ethnographies of Encounter. Annual Review of Anthropology, 43(1), 363–377.

Pratt. (1992). Arts of the Contact Zone. Profession: 33-40

Mariam Durrani is an assistant professor of anthropology at Hamilton College where she teaches courses on cultural and linguistic anthropology, Muslim youth, gender and sexuality, feminist ethnography, semiotics, and migration/mobility. Durrani’s current research examines how the category of “Muslim youth” is shifting and being redefined in this contested terrain such that we have unexpected, headstrong, and disruptive forms of mobility that challenge scholarship on migration, Islam, and youth. By closely following young people as they move through and beyond higher education, this ethnography shows how these processes unfold for Pakistani-origin Muslim youth as they “come of age” in the contemporary global moment. She can be reached at mdurrani@hamilton.edu.