Nada Berrada: Conducting interdisciplinary research on youth in Morocco
The following story was written in April 2019 by Ashley Bond in ENGL 4824: Science Writing as part of a collaboration between the English department and the Center for Communicating Science.
How do we define youth? What does it mean to have a voice? How can we possess and act on agency?
These are some of the questions that concern Virginia Tech's ASPECT (Alliance for Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural Thought) Ph.D. student Nada Berrada in her research. Berrada is studying youths’ perceptions of their own agency and voice. She is looking at their ability to reflect on the issues they confront, their actions on those reflections, and their ability to possibly make a difference in their lives, in the lives of their community, and in Morocco today.
Berrada became especially interested in this issue when she served as a youth delegate from Morocco during the 2015-2016 70th annual General Assembly of the United Nations. During that convention, the participating delegates emphasized that "Youth are not the future; they are the present." The choices that young people make in their everyday lives about their needs, opportunities, and responsibilities play a role in shaping their futures.
Born in Morocco herself, Berrada plans this summer to interview a group of young people living in an underprivileged neighborhood in the city of Casablanca, Morocco. These interviews will help her learn about young people’s lives, familial relationships, education, work trajectories and experiences, and their goals and aspirations. Berrada hopes these interviews will highlight how young people in Morocco perceive their autonomy and agency and how they hope to achieve their goals and aspirations in the social, political, economic, and cultural contexts in which they find themselves.
While conducting her fieldwork, Berrada plans to ensure her interviewees are validated and heard. When conducting her interviews, she’s working with three different languages, but her thesis will be written in English. Berrada wants to ensure that the meaning of the words in her interviews do not get lost in translation.
She also hopes that the insights and experiences of those she interviews will be considered widely within and beyond the academic community. She therefore plans to share her findings in “publications, at scholarly conferences, with interested government officials and nongovernmental organizations, as well as through additional public outlets,” she said.
Berrada has learned a lot of valuable lessons in her time as a researcher at Virginia Tech. She has discovered that “the researcher role comes with great responsibility and accountability, which cannot be achieved without reflexivity.”
As a graduate student, Berrada is responsible for teaching one undergraduate course per semester. The most important advice that she has found to carry over from her research to the classroom is “to approach knowledge with humility, to be aware of how one's epistemological assumptions, identity, and positionality influence what one knows and to seek to listen attentively.” Indeed, she believes that sharing the voices of youth who are shaping today's world will not matter if researchers and teachers considering those perspectives do not do so sensibly, fairly, and thoughtfully.