RGP Cycle Two Grantees and Projects
Ibrahim Makkawi: Collective Identity, Relative Deprivation and Social Mobility in Colonial Context: Palestinian Students from within the “Green Line” Attending the Hebrew University in Comparison with Birzeit University.
This study combines Social Identity Theory (SIT) (Tajfel, 1981) and Relative Deprivation Theory (RD) (Crosby, 1976) with research on the negotiation of social-ethnic identity in changing contexts (Deaux & Ethier, 1998) in order to explore the experiences of Palestinian students from within the “green line” in tow contradictory educational contexts. First, I explore the process of collective-national identity development during the college years (Phinney, 1989) among members of the same social group in two contradictory contexts (Hebrew University and Birzeit University). Second, integrating SIT and RD traditions, in combination with the notion of in-betweenity status (Bulhan, 1980), I explore and compare cross contexts the students’ sense of group relative deprivation in relation to their status of in-betweenity . Third, I explore the conflictive relationship between acquiring higher education and upward social mobility for members of this group of Palestinians within complex colonial context. The study is designed to be conducted on three phases. The first phase of the study will include in-depth qualitative inquiry based on grounded theory (Glassr & Strauss, 1967) research procedures and will focus on the experience of Palestinian students in the Hebrew University. The second phase of the study will include similar qualitative inquiry with Palestinian students from within the “green line” attending Birzeit University at the time of the study. In the third phase, I intend to construct a quantitative questionnaire drown from the literature and refined based on the qualitative finding from the previous two studies.
Ibrahim Makkawi received his Ph.D. in educational psychology from Kent State University, USA, with research emphasis on collective-national identity development among Palestinian student activists in Israeli universities. Following a few years of teaching in several American universities, he joined the faculty of Birzeit University, Palestine, in 2004. He is the founding director of the Masters Program in Community Psychology at Birzeit University (2008-2013) where the program’s spotlight has been teaching and conducting community research as critical praxis, decolonizing psychology, and community engagement as a form of liberation and well being. His currently active research program includes issues of social identity and relative deprivation among Palestinian college students in colonial contexts, critical and decolonizing community psychology, feminist psychology and Palestinian female students’ educational resilience.
