The article examines improved marriage opportunities as an unexplored motivator for pursuing international education via U.S. graduate engineering degrees and stresses the need to centralize gender in analyzing academic mobility and international education. This interdisciplinary qualitative study explores how South Indian men and women’s experiences with international graduate education migration held gendered consequences for marriage and dowry. The participants show that the pursuit of a U.S. graduate engineering degree impacts a family’s social and financial status by improving student’s marriage options, including love marriages, arranged ones, and dowry. The research has implications for the recruitment and retention of Indian men and women engineers as graduate school migration overlaps with the socially preferred marriage timeline and it encourages policy makers and administrators to consider nontraditional motivators.
As two white women attempting to live differently in white bodies we are damned. Any choice we make is embedded in white supremacy. Damned if we do/speak/act, damned if we don’t. Recognizing this damnation, we began asking where else we could go and how else we could live. In this article, we conceptualize what emerges between “damned if I do, damned if I don’t” as the possibility of disordering whiteness and living differently. We conceptualize our method in this piece as relationship. In relationship, we trace the necessary but impossible, discursive, embodied, and geographic space that is damnation.
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