| This critical ethnographic project is based on one year of field-work carried out in an urban high school in the context of Karachi. The research seeks to critically explore the local-global dynamic as it manifests in the school's official curriculum and the students' lived-world experiences, especially with reference to their interaction with the media-scape, which in turn bears implications on dissolution and re-construction of students' identities.;The research finds the schooling and media as globalizing and localizing sites for the youth. The official curriculum, especially the Pakistan Studies textbook, constructs a sense of narrow political nationalism that seems to inform the students' sense of national identity. The local/national reference is constituted by three complex interrelated discourses: religious/ideological (reference of Islam); linguistic nationalism (Urdu language); and territorial (juridical-legal bounded-space). Furthermore, the official text constructs the local as national (political) and ethnic as (sub-national) references, whereby the national identity overrides the sub-national/ethnic identities.;With reference to the global, the official text constructs the global as trans-national/supra-national, as religious/social reference to Ummah (Muslim collectivity), and as international. Whilst the school text mainly provides a nation-state-centric view of the world and the other, the media-scape in particular and the lived-world in general open up multiple references of belonging, identifications, and differences for the students. Beyond schooling, high school youth are actively interacting with the global through the media-scape (Appadurai, 1996). Agency's interaction with the media-scape in particular and dis-embedding mechanisms in general is found to be generating de/territorialization (Inda & Rosaldo, 2002) which is bringing both anxiety as well as opportunity for the self.;The students' interaction with the global, especially through Bollywood and Hollywood media, at times produces a sense of disjuncture for students, between the mediated global values, attitudes, and life-styles and the normatively acceptable local values and life styles. Furthermore, students confront a sense of colonial difference (Mignolo, 2000), especially in the realm of knowledge, which leads them to feel a cultural gap between the West and the East, and the global and the local. As a reaction, the students are found to be exercising nostalgia as a counter-discourse to the hegemony of Euro-centric modernity/knowledge. This experience of disjuncture and colonial difference generates frustration as well as a state of ambivalence for students.;Theoretically, the research draws upon discourses of critical sociology, especially the notions of structuration (Giddens, 1993), to analyze the local-global dynamic, and structural, which conceives agency as an innovative and intuitive self (Bourdieu, 1989), as well as post-colonial perspectives to illuminate historical and political contexts that have shaped the locality within which the agency in question is situated (Rizvi, 2004). Subsequently, the research employs an ethnographic research method. In this respect, monological and dialogical data were generated through participant observation, focus group discussions, semi-structured and open-ended interviews, participant-made visuals, document/textbook analysis, observation and analysis of the school's material culture, and home-visits. The data analysis was informed by Carspecken's (1996) methodological guide.;My research finds that student agency is strategically and innovatively responding to disjuncture and experienced ambivalence through the politics of identity. In this regard, one of the ways students respond is by using hybrid language and dressing; that is, hybridization is a strategy to gain global social capital, as well as a way to step in and out of modernity and tradition (Rosaldo, 1995). In some cases, student agency makes reference to Ummah (Muslim collectivity) and the new media (Eickelman & Anderson, 2003) to re-filliate with their local moorings; it thus engages in a process of what I refer to as solidifying their identities. For this purpose, they are paradoxically using the very globalizing technologies against the forces of cultural globalization, to re-localize their identities. At the same time, some students are found as agents who are engaging in acts of re-interpretation of both modernity and tradition, with a view to reinventing their identities beyond the modernity/tradition, West/East, global/local dichotomies. These agents are striving in a nutshell to re-create an identity beyond difference. In doing so they are found as trying to reconcile two competing impulses within the self; that is, being rooted in the particular/local and feeling coherence with the global (Aga Khan, 2008). |
