“Somehow, I will convince my people, … . I will have to follow but I won’t accept everything”: Asian women’s empowerment via higher education

This paper presents findings from a three-year longitudinal qualitative case-study exploring the experiences of Asian women returning home after completing higher education. Drawing on the literature on empowerment, education and identity, analyses point to the empowering and displacing aspects of education: While education enhances choice, awareness, self-confidence, and status in the family, it also produces differences which are utilized to delegitimize and destabilise the empowerment process, through frames of culture, class and gender. The paper addresses how these women negotiate these conflicting experiences, mitigate the alienation that empowerment and education processes can trigger, and maintain their new identities and aspirations. This contributes to understanding the complexity and multidimensional nature of empowerment dynamics for women in cross-cultural higher education processes in the Global South