Doctoral Dissertation Research: Intersections of nationality and recovery status in shaping gender

Stanford University, Stanford CA

Investigators

Abstract

Drug rehabilitation centers have proliferated to assist communities fighting addiction and associated problems. These centers are increasingly common in areas with mixed nationalities, offering an opportunity to understand how national status and the process of recovery work together to shape how individuals understand and relate to different notions of gender, and how gender and nationality feedback on the recovery process to affect its success and duration. The study draws from social scientific research addressing drug addiction, gender, and nationality to investigate whether, and in what ways, masculinity and recovery are intertwined among individuals with varying nationalities. In addition to training a graduate student in scientific cultural anthropology, this research disseminates its work broadly to academic and non-academic audiences and interested stakeholders. Over twelve months, the researchers conduct participant-observation, semi-structured interviews, and discourse analysis across a variety of rehabilitation centers, and among recovering drug users and their families. The researchers analyze how dominant masculine ideologies connect to various phases of recovery, and how expressions of masculinity change across different settings, from very private to very social, and among individuals of different nationalities. Doing so offers important nuance to theories of recovery that focus primarily on differences between men and women of the same nationality, and to changing conceptions of masculinity as behavior and beliefs change in association with recovery from drug use. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.