When I was a sophomore studying in the College of Law in Kurdistan, my father`s death made my burden much heavier. I struggled to keep up with my difficult classes, in addition to working at a job outside of school and providing food for my teenage siblings. Day after day, my frustration with society`s behavior against women increased. After my graduation in 2009, I started working as a lawyer in the Sulaimany city courthouse in Iraqi Kurdistan. For this, I needed to improve my rhetorical strength in order to impact the larger system. Yet, as I dealt with cases and witnessed the first-hand account of social injustice, my anger increased more and more as I could clearly see in the court cases how men oppress women under the name of religion and culture. The depth of my convictions in these instances inspired my larger career journey.
After organizing events and seminars to educate people about women`s rights, I decided to come to the United States to pursue a master’s degree in the humanities, focusing on women`s studies. Throughout my graduate studies, I have sought out leadership positions that complement my experience in the classroom and build my professional skills. After I became a member of the ODU/MSA organization (Muslim Student Association), I began to do presentations on Islamic cultures as a means of reducing the predominant xenophobia in the USA. I also sought to reach out to refugee populations who are in the process of resettling in Hampton Roads. I volunteered at the local refugee center and developed an extended language program, which I am now leading in Newport News. With a great passion for this subject, I figured out that language is a defining barrier that limits refugees’ capacities to attain work, interact in society, and ultimately, realize their dreams. By witnessing this reality, I decided to do a thorough research project on how to improve English language skills when it is not one’s mother language.
Based on this experience, my first class-concentration is the concentration of Rhetoric, Writing, and Discourse Studies. My plan is to strengthen my academic writing skills to use it in publishing papers in my field of interest. Attracting the audience is not an easy task, it needs impressive words as well as delivery. I plan to apply rhetoric to the larger global social justice concerns that have centered my experience throughout my life.
My second concentration of classes is the one that is called student-designed concentration. In this part, I am focusing on gender study as a feminist researcher. Throughout my experience on working with the refugees, I have felt a substantial difference between the men and women who come from the same country with the same background. Their predicaments about learning a new language, such as English, are different in some ways. For instance, men learn the English language at work from their co-workers while women try to learn the English language from TV and books. this is because most of the refugee women do not work due to cultural and religious barriers. My plan in this concentration of classes is to focus on cultural predicaments in learning the language for refugee women in Hampton Roads. My hope is to learn as much as possible in finding the best ways of teaching the English language to the newly-arrived refugees, especially women. This could be the techniques of helping the refugees in pronouncing the words as close as possible to how they are pronounced. This problem is different for refugees from different language backgrounds. For instance, the Arabic speakers have difficulties in pronouncing the English alphabetic letter of P, they pronounce it as B. In English language, changing P to B often changes the meaning, a simple example could be the word of “parking,”. they pronounce it as “barking.” This changes the meaning totally. This applied topic will allow me to look at the intersection of rhetoric and language acquisition.
I have roled as extras in a short film produced by the Women’s Study Department at Virginia Commonwealth University to show the difficulties that some of the refugees and the immigrants go through while on exile heading to the Western countries.