One of the primary themes I came across in my research is that of identity. It can sometimes be hard to realize that not only are our identifications of people not always analogous to what they identify themselves as, and that people can identify themselves as a whole host of different things. Identity is multifaceted and complex, not planar and unitary. In my research, I was careful to ask students if they personally "identified" as something--not whether they "were" something or not, and not whether other people saw them as something ( e.g. "Muslim" or "American"). I was also careful not to make assumptions about where a person identified with culturally and geographically, and tried to accomplish this by asking students what "ethnicity" they identified with. One student, when asked this question did not know whether to identify as Arab or Egyptian. Another said that she identified as "Bengali/Bangladeshi" but said that she wanted to make sure that her children knew how to speak Bengali. Another student identified himself ethnically as Indian, but ended up saying later, when asked about whether or not he identified as American, that Dubai, UAE was where home was for him--that was the place he most strongly identified with. Still other students who one-hundred percent identified as American, and who had lived here their entire lives also identified with other cultures as well.When I started to conduct interviews, I did not realize the imperative to ask students to what extent they identified as American as well, even though that was the claim in my research title of whom I was studying. Originally, I was only interested in studying students who identified both as Muslim and American, but this proved to be a quite slippery task. Some students said they did identify as Muslim, but that they were not particularly religious, others said that their parents identified as Muslim, but they did not, because they were not religious. In addition, I became interested in what international Muslims had to say, because their experiences of Greek institutions ended up deviating from any sort of noticeable pattern as much as those who identified as "American." I ended up interviewing both "American" and international students, because I wanted to listen to what everyone's experiences and feelings were, not to mention that I wanted to follow this growing mystery in the unfolding narrative of identity. In fact, the more complex I realized that identity was, the more I realized that the answers I received to my interview questions were probably not going to establish any sort of navigable trends, which actually ended up helping my research more than if I had been able to establish trends. My research led me to a vaster and, I believe, more important realization--that in studying people, social scientists can be quick to separate the humanity from the person. However, if this mistake is made, we prevent ourselves from ever making any applicable solutions to problems that we see in the world and we may end up misinterpreting their sources, or even the problem themselves, also making any solutions to them futile and ineffectual.
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