This January UC Santa Barbara’s Gevirtz School alumnus James Austin embarked to Egypt to complete the first half of his research project entitled Intra-nationalism: Conceptualizing New Intersections Between US-Based Higher Education Models and Students in Middle East and North African Nations. To help fund this project, Austin was awarded an Emergent Researcher Award, sponsored by the Conference on College Composition and Communication, a leading organization in the field of rhetoric, composition, and writing studies.
Austin’s research in Egypt was primarily focused on studying the writing and literacy development of Egyptian undergraduates at the American University in Cairo who had graduated from an Egyptian public high school. Students that attend the AUC are typically from wealthy or influential families, and Austin wanted to understand the experience from the point of view of someone outside of that sphere. He was particularly interested in the ways in which supposedlyWestern forms of literacy and communication are taken up and adapted by such students and what avenues they pursue with these developing abilities.
Austin – who is currently an Assistant Professor of English at Fort Hays State University – received his MA and Ph.D. from the Department of Education and wrote his 2015 dissertation The Literacy Learning Experiences of Egyptian Students at the American University in Cairo: At the Intersection of Transnational Dimensionality and Intranational Flow in Literacy Studies as a prelude to his current project. The second half of his research will include visiting one other MENA nation, and then compiling his research into a book.