Parenting, Identity and Culture in an Era of Migration and Globalization: How Bangladeshi Parents Navigate and Negotiate Child-Rearing Practices in the Usa
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University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Doctoral Dissertations Dissertations and Theses October 2018 PARENTING, IDENTITY AND CULTURE IN AN ERA OF MIGRATION AND GLOBALIZATION: HOW BANGLADESHI PARENTS NAVIGATE AND NEGOTIATE CHILD-REARING PRACTICES IN THE USA Mohammad Mahboob Morshed University of Massachusetts Amherst Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2 Part of the International and Comparative Education Commons Recommended Citation Morshed, Mohammad Mahboob, "PARENTING, IDENTITY AND CULTURE IN AN ERA OF MIGRATION AND GLOBALIZATION: HOW BANGLADESHI PARENTS NAVIGATE AND NEGOTIATE CHILD-REARING PRACTICES IN THE USA" (2018). Doctoral Dissertations. 1373. https://doi.org/10.7275/12682074 https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/1373 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Dissertations and Theses at ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. PARENTING, IDENTITY AND CULTURE IN AN ERA OF MIGRATION AND GLOBALIZATION: HOW BANGLADESHI PARENTS NAVIGATE AND NEGOTIATE CHILD-REARING PRACTICES IN THE USA A Dissertation Presented by MOHAMMAD MAHBOOB MORSHED Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY September 2018 College of Education © Copyright by Mohammad Mahboob Morshed 2018 All Rights Reserved PARENTING, IDENTITY AND CULTURE IN AN ERA OF MIGRATION AND GLOBALIZATION: HOW BANGLADESHI PARENTS NAVIGATE AND NEGOTIATE CHILD-REARING PRACTICES IN THE USA A Dissertation Presented by MOHAMMAD MAHBOOB MORSHED Approved as to style and content by: ____________________________________ Jacqueline R. Mosselson, Chair ____________________________________ John C. Carey, Member ____________________________________ Leda M. Cooks, Member ____________________________________ Jennifer Randall Associate Dean of Academic Affairs College of Education DEDICATION To my lovely daughter Orrorin and my wonderful wife Sumera. You two fulfill my life. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to express my deepest sense of gratitude to the research participants for their willingness to participate in the study and generously sharing their experiences with me. It has been an extremely insightful and humbling experience for me to learn about their lives, their stories, their resilience and their dreams. I wish to express my sincere gratitude to my committee members for their encouragements, supports, and critiques. I am grateful to advisor, Jacqueline Mosselson, Ph.D., for her many years of thoughtful, patient guidance and support. I feel very privileged to have Dr. Mosselson as my advisor who not only guided me throughout the course of my Ph.D., but also mentored me for my future career growth, trusted me and respected me as a colleague and as a person. I look forward to continuing my academic journey with Dr. Mosselson as a colleague, as a mentor and as a companion. Thanks are also due to my committee members, John Carey, Ph.D., and Leda Cooks, Ph.D. for their helpful comments and suggestions on all stages of this study. I want to thank Shimul Afroz for her significant contribution in transcribing the interviews. It has been immensely helpful. I am deeply thankful to my friends at the Center for International Education. Special thanks to Hye Seung Cho, Stephen Richardson, and Yaëlle Stempfelet. Without their support, it would not have been possible to emotionally survive this long and difficult journey. Last but not the least, I would like to acknowledge my family members: my parents, my wife, my daughter, my in-laws and my siblings, whose love, support, sincere wish and patience brought me here today. I am truly blessed to have you in my life. v ABSTRACT PARENTING, IDENTITY AND CULTURE IN AN ERA OF MIGRATION AND GLOBALIZATION: HOW BANGLADESHI PARENTS NAVIGATE AND NEGOTIATE CHILD-REARING PRACTICES IN THE USA SEPTEMBER 2018 MOHAMMAD MAHBOOB MORSHED, B.Ed., UNIVERSITY OF DHAKA M.Ed., UNIVERSITY OF DHAKA M.A., UCL INSTITUTE OF EDUCATION Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor Jacqueline R. Mosselson Globalization puts into challenge the singular notion of identity and culture. Immigrant parents must navigate multiple cultural systems and constantly redefine their identities in order to cope with a new way of being. This dissertation is aimed at learning about this cultural encounter faced by Bangladeshi immigrant parents living in Western Massachusetts region of the USA. More specifically, I studied immigrant Bangladeshi parents’ identity negotiations, their navigation of transnational spaces, and cultural negotiation in relation to their children’s schooling. My research is informed by cultural theories of immigration and globalization. Guattari’s concept of ‘existential territory’ (Guattari, 1995, 2000), Appadurai’s ideas of ‘scape’ in explaining the process of globalization (Appadurai, 1990, 1996, 2000, 2002), Hall’s concept of cultural identity (Hall, 1990) and Bhabha’s (1994) idea of cultural hybridity served as theoretical resources for the study. I followed qualitative research approach with a focus on experiential paradigm to learn about the subjective and lived experiences of parents. I used criteria-sampling (Patton, 2002) to select 13 parents from 8 vi families and conducted genogram construction, in-depth interviews and follow-up interviews with them. I also interviewed 2 family members, 4 adolescent children and 2 community members-all selected based on pre-established criteria. The findings related to first research question suggested that Bangladeshi parents were open to changes and made intentional choices to interconnect Bangladeshi and U.S. culture as they reconstructed their identities. The second theme discussed how parents navigated transnational spaces. Three physical spaces namely as Western Massachusetts, New York and Bangladesh created a sense of imagined, complex, interconnected homelands as they made sense of their cultural experiences of parenting. Findings related to the third research question revealed that parents showed a complex set of intentional behaviors such as enthusiasm, selectivity, compromise, reluctance and fear as they embraced hopes and opportunities and navigated competing and contradictory cultural demands of their children’s schooling. The central arguments of this dissertation situated parenting as nuance experiences of disjuncture, hope and opportunities where parents navigate culture and identity through intentionality and informed choices to create a newer form of existence in a globalized world. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...................................................................................................v ABSTRACT ....................................................................................................................... vi LIST OF TABLES ........................................................................................................... xiii LIST OF FIGURES ......................................................................................................... xiv CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................1 Statement of the Problem .........................................................................................1 Bangladeshi Immigrants in the USA .......................................................................3 Western Massachusetts: The Research Site .............................................................5 Bangladeshi Immigrants in Western Massachusetts ................................................7 Research Questions ..................................................................................................8 Rationale of the Study ..............................................................................................9 Organization of the Dissertation ............................................................................11 2. LITERATURE REVIEW AND ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK .......................14 Globalization, Identity and Culture........................................................................14 Cultural Homogeneity ................................................................................15 Bicultural Existence ...................................................................................16 Identity Confusion .....................................................................................17 Cultural Continuity vs Hybridity ...............................................................18 Deterritorialization and Disjuncture ..........................................................21 Redefined Space and Existence .................................................................22 Immigrant Parents in an Era of Globalization .......................................................24 Maintaining Cultural Continuity in a Globalized Transnational World ....26 Parenting as Transnational and Hybrid ......................................................31 Parenting and Identity among Bangladeshi Immigrant Parents .............................38 Cultural Continuity through Bengali and Islamic Identities as Guiding Themes .................................................................................................38