“Why not the thoub and the abaya?” An interactional sociolinguistic approach to the interplay between nationality, gender, and professional identity in the Qatari academic workplace

Abstract

Although identity is recognized as an important topic in Arabic sociolinguistics, little attention has been paid to how major structural changes impact different forms of identity, especially in professional and workplace contexts. In this article we tackle this gap to investigate how Qatari junior academics give meaning to their professional identities as they negotiate the roles they claim to fulfil vis-à-vis their students in a particularly complex workplace context characterized by processes of internationalization and nationalization. More specifically, we work from a social constructionist perspective and adopt the “narrative as social practice” approach (De Fina & Georgakopoulou 2008) to carry out micro-oriented linguistic analyses of research interviews with female Qatari junior academics. Our findings indicate that the interviewees often present themselves in their stories as “role-models,” not only as and vis-à-vis women but also, and even more importantly, as and vis-à-vis Qataris. This invocation of the intersectionality of their identities reflects the complexity of this changing academic workplace. Finally, this article points at the importance of investigating identities of people who are directly affected by organizational change, as it uncovers the in situ effects on the micro-level of processes on the macro-level.