Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Figuring the Moroccan Child: Socialization, Normativity, and Social Change in Rur-urban Casablanca

University Of Chicago, Chicago IL

Investigators

Abstract

Graduate student Christine Nutter, supervised by Dr. Tanya M. Lhurmann, will undertake research on the integration of new western psychiatric and new Islamic ideas about both normative and abnormal childhood into already existing childrearing practices in Casablanca, Morocco. Despite a significant global increase in the practices that constitute child psychiatry, there is little social science research evaluating the local-level consequences of this trend. The implications of the adoption of these practices in non-Western contexts include a potential restructuring of the way that societies think about the child and the self, as well as how children in distress are treated. At the same time, in North Africa and the Middle East, emerging Islamic revival movements offer a competing vision of childhood and of illness that emphasizes adherence to Islamic beliefs and practices and a negotiation of modern life within these boundaries. The researcher will undertake twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork in a lower-class Casablanca neighborhood. Her research methods will include participant-observation in families, schools, on the street, and in healing institutions in this neighborhood. She also will conduct semi-structured, indepth interviews with both children and adults to understand how new ideas about children are understood and used by children and adults in their everyday lives. The research is important because it will contribute to the growing field of cross-cultural studies of children. Understanding how new ideas influence the behavior and interior lives of both children and adults may contribute to knowledge of how processes of globalization and urbanization change people's ideas about what it means to be normal,, how children should be raised and disciplined, and how these children will grow up experiencing and acting upon the world. This study will contribute to a theoretical understanding of mechanisms underlying social change, as well as an exploration of better practices in the field of child mental health with diverse cultural groups. The research also will contribute to the education of a social scientist.