Questions of education in families

The subproject examines educational issues from the perspective of Arab families who have settled in Finland and Lebanon. Based on ethnographic participant observation among Syrian and Iraqi families in Finland and Syrian families in Beirut, the research focuses on the interplay between gendered family dynamics and educational opportunities. The aim is to understand how educational issues are intertwined with affective and intimate aspects of everyday life. The focus is on the relational forms of care between spouses and gendered agency.

While settling in Finland and Lebanon, displaced women and men face different challenges and opportunities for work and education, depending on the local societal conditions. Our research demonstrates the role of these structural factors in the formation of everyday gender relations and practices by focusing on the three following angles: 1) How do context-specific educational opportunities shape affective couple dynamics and gendered agency within Arab families; 2) How do gendered caring practices within a household affect women’s opportunities to pursue education and become socialized in new language environments; 3) How do parents perceive the role of education in their children’s future.

Events

Love, marriage and dating in the Arab world – online course

The course led by Sandra Nasser El-Dine and organised by the Finnish Institute in the Middle East, focused on the anthropological study of love, marriage, and dating practices in the Middle East. Its goal was to provide an ethnographically grounded overview of the diversity of dating and marital practices across different regions of the contemporary Middle East and offer tools to assess various frameworks for examining this subject.

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