Date of Award
7-2026
Document Type
Dissertation
Publisher
Santa Clara : Santa Clara University, 2026
Degree Name
Doctor of Education (EdD)
Abstract
The purpose of this phenomenological study was to examine the lived experiences of Indian women on H-4-dependent visas as they navigated higher education in the United States. Framed by intersectionality (Collins, 2000; Crenshaw, 1989, 1991) and guided by van Manen’s (1990) hermeneutic phenomenology, this study employed semi-structured interviews to explore the experiences of Indian women on H-4-dependent visas (n=5). Using in-depth interviews and reflexive memo writing as methods of data collection, analysis uncovered four themes which captured how participants navigated higher education, identity, and well-being under conditions of legal dependency: “The Weight of Legal Dependency,” which captured participants’ experiences of professional erasure, identity crisis, and the somatic consequences of structural constraint; “Education as Navigation,” which captured participants’ experiences of refusing inactivity, reclaiming professional identity through enrollment, and encountering the honest limits of what education alone could accomplish; “The Institution Is Not Neutral,” which captured participants’ experiences of financial exclusion, forced field selection, and a career support gap that stopped at the threshold of their visa status; and “Living in Privilege, Constraint, and Uncertainty,” which captured participants’ experiences of holding simultaneous gratitude and resentment, navigating temporal precarity, and maintaining conditional hope within a structure that offered no guarantees. This study concludes with a discussion of the findings in the context of prior literature and implications for immigration policy reform and institutional practice. Examining how immigration constraint, gender, and race converge in the educational lives of Indian women on H-4 visas can inform how higher education institutions and policymakers address the structural invisibility of one of the most credentialed and most constrained dependent visa populations in the United States.
Recommended Citation
Priya, Tanu, "“I Was Nobody in the Us”: A Phenomenological Examination of Indian Women on H-4-Dependent Visas Navigating Higher Education in the United States" (2026). Social Justice in Educational Leadership EdD Dissertations. 37.
https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/ed_dissertations/37
