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

研究生Christine Nutter在Tanya M. Lhurmann博士的指导下，将在摩洛哥卡萨布兰卡进行一项研究，将新的西方精神病学和新的伊斯兰教关于规范和异常儿童的思想融入到现有的儿童养育实践中。尽管构成儿童精神病学的实践在全球范围内显著增加，但很少有社会科学研究评估这一趋势在地方层面的后果。在非西方环境中采用这些做法的含义包括社会对儿童和自我的思考方式的潜在重组，以及如何对待痛苦的儿童。与此同时，在北非和中东，新兴的伊斯兰复兴运动提供了一种关于童年和疾病的竞争性观点，强调坚持伊斯兰信仰和习俗，并在这些界限内协商现代生活。研究人员将在卡萨布兰卡的一个下层阶级社区进行为期12个月的人种学田野调查。她的研究方法将包括在这个社区的家庭、学校、街道和治疗机构中进行参与式观察。她还将对儿童和成人进行半结构化的深度访谈，以了解儿童和成人在日常生活中如何理解和使用关于儿童的新想法。这项研究很重要，因为它将促进儿童跨文化研究领域的发展。了解新思想如何影响儿童和成人的行为和内心生活，可能有助于了解全球化和城市化进程如何改变人们对“正常”意味着什么的观念，如何抚养和管教儿童，以及这些儿童长大后将如何体验和对世界采取行动。这项研究将有助于从理论上理解社会变革的机制，并探索不同文化群体儿童心理健康领域的更好做法。这项研究也将有助于社会科学家的教育。

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.