In Professional identity constructions of Indian women, Priti Sandhu examines processes of professional identity construction through analyses of work-related identity constructions uncovered in young, urban North Indian women's narratives on medium of education (MoE). The MoEs under analysis are Hindi medium education (HME), English medium education (EME), or a combination of Hindi and English medium education. The data has been analysed in terms of stylization, reported speech, mock languages, emotion-indexing devices, negative self-or other-labelling, imagery and metaphors, laughter and laughing tone, stress and intonation variations, irony and sarcasm, and lexical and syntactic choices (44).

The contextualization of the study addresses the foundational issue of how the twenty-two participants narrate the impact of their medium of education (MoE) on their lives. Sandhu selected Hindi for this study because it is the dominant local language across the five research sites of this study, and government schools use it as their MoE (57). The five North Indian cities and towns included in the study are Dehradun, Mussoorie, Haridwar, Rishikesh, and Delhi. In a personal account, Sandhu states ‘Dehradun, which is my hometown, was selected for the initial legs of the study because it was where I grew up and was educated and where I lived for the first twenty-seven years of my life’ (79).

As stated earlier, twenty-two women's narratives are analysed from three types of linguistic educational backgrounds: HME only (fourteen), EME only (two), and a combination of HME and EME (six) (87). All of the women narrated their jobs or search for jobs as having had some impact on their arranged marriage discussions or on their romantic relationships (87). Once the data was collected, all of the interviews were transcribed and then reviewed, and the researcher identified all instances where the participants told stories about their MoEs. Sandhu elaborates that these were then transcribed in greater detail, and each story was classified according to its general theme, for example, if the story related to searching for suitable job advertisements or whether it was about some on-the-job experience (91).

The narratives are categorized as job advertisements, job interviews, on the job, and personal domains. The study accounts for different issues that participants brought up; for instance, Mrigya's story is on ‘implicating gender’ (119), Jeevika's story is on ‘the consequences of speaking in Hindi during job interviews’ (149), whereas Chetna's story is on ‘Medium of education and professional workplace relationships’ (204). In addition, Dhara's story is on ‘Building strategic partnership at the workplace’ (218), and Nalini's story discusses the ‘Potential fallout of not having the “right” job or the “right” MoE’ (263).

To conclude, Sandhu (325) states that the concepts of discursive empowerments and disempowerments and the analytical framework established for the analysis of the enactments offer a rich toolkit for analysing narratives about complex, social phenomena, as recounted by or alluded to by participants in qualitative research interviews.