Armenian-Canadian women in diaspora: the role of higher education in (up)rooted lives, burdened souls, and enlivened spirits

This dissertation is a life history research-a collective process of remembering, telling, writing, and unravelling. The participants, including myself, are seven Armenian women in Toronto and Montreal who have been educators in Armenian schools and/or in Canadian Universities.

Participants have refashioned their lives as Armenian-Canadians and faced the discomfort of living in displaced identities, the disconnect between self and communities, and the ambivalence of belonging neither here nor there. Even though uprooted from their birthplace and deracinated from their ancestral land, participants continue finding ways to establish roots and to secure spaces within Canadian communities in their efforts to renegotiate their identities as diasporans. In their community of learners and teachers, they are resolute with their fragmented selves-multilocal, multilingual, hybrid. They find a home in their hostland Canada and a spiritual homeland in Armenia.

The qualitative nature of this research allowed me to balance my dual roles as researcher and participant. Life history research demanded complex and interconnected relationships among the researcher, the participants, and the communities. It involved a reflexive practice and a responsive engagement with and within the context of the research. Interviews, group discussions, and autoethnographic writing were the methods I used to gather data.

I conceptualized my findings within the theoretical framing of feminist poststructural theory and diaspora concepts. I explored the following: Participants' motivation to pursue education in their mature years; the role of formal learning in reconstructing uprooted lives and at the same time, renegotiating socialized and historicized identities; the burden and the privilege of an inherited history, in particular the history of the Armenian Genocide.

This is a project that finds significance not only in the struggles of displacement and resettlement of Armenian women in Canada but also in the recalling, the reliving, and the reconstructing of stories. It is an interpretive inquiry into the personal that stems from and is shaped by individual, historical, social, economic, and political forces. Therefore, I have addressed the context of telling, the spaces participants spoke from and about, the communities they represented, the ideologies they promoted, and the silences they may have maintained.