Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant: Language Socialization, Education, and Social Transformation in a Context of Socioeconomic Inequality

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This research will investigate the role of children's religious education in the spread of new norms of Islamic piety. The research is located in a formally secular state that is currently undergoing a popular religious revival. This project seeks to understand how reformist Islamic groups use informal neighborhood Quran schools to mold pious children. These schools are important venues for proselytizing politically and economically marginalized neighborhoods long stigmatized for a lack of proper piety. The researcher will examine how the piety taught in the schools affects everyday interactions among children, their families, and their neighbors, and contribute to the spread the Islamic Revival to new communities. This research uses methods in the study of language socialization to provide new insight on how moral subjects are formed in the context of everyday social interactions. The focus on the role of neighborhood schools in moral and religious proselytization will further our understanding of children as agents of social change.By examining children's neighborhood Quran schools, this research addresses key questions in the anthropology of morality and religion: 1) how do individuals take on responsibility as moral subjects within a community and 2) how do the norms of a moral community change? Conducting research not only in the classroom, but also in the surrounding community, this project will observe how the children both learn explicit moral discourses and are drawn into the moral practices of everyday life. This research thus goes beyond the standard frameworks contrasting religion and secularism, and Islam and the West, to give us greater insight into the internal dynamics of change among Muslims during a time of major religious transformations.