Memory Makes Sense: De/Reconstructing the Curricular Imaginaries of Pakhtun Female University Students Through Multimodal Memory-Work and Currere

Abstract

This study explores the lived curricular experiences (Grumet, 1988; Pinar, 2012) of Pakhtun female students at the graduate and undergraduate level in Ontario, Canada. Using Frigga Haug’s (1987; 1999) memory-work integrated with William Pinar’s currere (2010; 2012) as the methodology, and hermeneutic phenomenology (van Manen, 1990) as the theoretical framework, this research helped five female Pakhtun university students including the lead researcher, make meaning of their lived curricular experiences. As a collective, they created “multimodal” (Stein, 2008, p. 19) “memory-texts” (Kuhn, 2010, p. 298) using memory, story, recital/performance, poetry/song, visual art/images and cultural artifacts to unpack their lived curricular experiences and narrate their identities after the said experiences. This study was first and foremost a safe place for them to speak from and to enact self-reflexive cultural and onto-epistemological meaning making (Lather, 1986a; 1988a; 1991). Since they are one of the most under-researched ethnic groups in the world (A.W. Khan, 2012), this research has tried to bridge the gaping hole of their invisibility in the epistemic discourse. Being a Pakhtun woman myself, this research is an act of naming for me as well as my co-researchers (Freire, 1970/2005). As a group of five co-researchers of this study, we believe that Pakhtunwali and the emancipatory rhetoric of the West have named us, our world, and our possibilities as Pakhtun women before we were even born (Abbas, 2016; Khattak, 2018). Delineating our lived experiences in our own voice gave us an opportunity to name ourselves and our world by ourselves and helped us grapple with the transformation or “difference within” (Puar, 2012, p. 53) that we experienced in the Canadian curricular milieu at the university level.