Integration of Arab Female Students at a Technological University—Narratives of Identity in Figured Worlds

This study deals with the academic identities of 13 female Arab students upon their entrance to STEM studies in a university in Israel. Female Arab students in a predominantly Jewish Israeli engineering institution face conflicting narratives regarding their ethnicity, gender, and its relation to possible success in university-level studies in general and mathematical studies in particular. To exemplify this, we focus on two students, Lena and Mira, who both encountered difficulties upon entering the institute, yet of different kinds. While Mira was mostly preoccupied with ethnic and religious conflictual narratives, Lena was occupied with gender-inferiority narratives. We use the concepts of current and designated identities and space of authorship within figured worlds to explain how different conflictual narratives permeated the identities of the two students. At the same time, we relate the findings from the two case studies to the more general findings from the 13 participants of the study.