Citizenship Attitudes and Social Inequality Among Moroccan University Students

ABSTRACT

Drawing on social identity approach, comprising of social identity theory and self-categorisation theory, this article compares the ways in which public and private university students in Morocco approach the controversial relationship between citizenship and identity. By revealing students’ self-identification and the role socio-economic factors have in this process, we seek to gain knowledge about the extent to which citizenship is perceived as a legal status as opposed to membership in a political community and how the transformation inherent in global market capitalism and the distribution of resources affect the youth’s behaviours and attitudes towards social action. The sample represented the public and private dichotomy divide through 150 participants from four differently located Moroccan universities, namely Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah University, Mohammed V University, Al-Akhawayn University and International University of Rabat. Data were collected by means of a self-administered questionnaire and a semi-structured interview and were analysed using a mixed method approach to triangulate findings and ensure trustworthiness.

KEYWORDS:

• identity
• citizenship
• Morocco
• university students
• public versus private

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hajar Idrissi

Hajar Idrissi holds a jointly supervised PhD in education and human development studies from Sidi Mohammed Ben Abdellah University, Morocco and the Graduate School of Education and Human Development, the George Washington University, USA. She has been a visiting doctoral student at the Institute of Social Studies, University of Tartu, Estonia. Her main research interests are citizenship education policy trends, global citizenship education, curriculum and instruction, sustainable development and climate change education. She is currently a project coordinator at the Moroccan Institute for Policy Analysis and a research associate in the Monitoring and Evaluating Climate Change Communication and Education Project funded by the Canadian Government.

Salma Takky

Salma Takky is a PhD candidate at the Psychological, Sociological and Cultural Studies Research Center, Sidi Mohammed Ben Abdellah University, where she researches the politics of gender and democracy ethos in media studies, and identity formation through documentary film making narratives. She serves as a programme officer for the FHI 360 Inclusive Socio-Economic Project in Morocco. Her research areas include gender and media discourse analysis, democracy and politics as well as American-Middle Eastern Relations.

Hind Idrissi

Hind Idrissi is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Insight Centre for Data Analytics at School of Computer Science and Information Technology, University College Cork, Ireland. She holds a PhD in computer science and information security from La Rochelle University in France. Her main research interests are cyber security, artificial intelligence, interactivity and privacy-enhancing technologies such as big data and the Internet-of-Things. She is particularly interested in the intersection between healthcare and the social sciences.