Moroccan Muslim Women Fulbrighters and Social Change

Abstract

This paper sets out to investigate the relationship between Moroccan Muslim women's educational travel to America and social change in their homeland. Obviously, over the past few decades, many Moroccan Muslim women from different walks of academic and professional life were selected as Fulbright grantees within the well-known Fulbright program with a view to improving their professional profiles and broadening their research horizons in America. Back to Morocco, after completing the period assigned to them, many Muslim women Fulbrighters, impacted by the cross-cultural education and training they were exposed to, have launched and participated in a plethora of projects and initiatives in an attempt to effect change in their own society in light of what they learnt in America. In the course of my paper, the focus will be put on some of these projects and initiatives and the ways these women have gone through to induce a feasible social change in the Moroccan society, including their new acquired conceptions of gender and feminist orientations. Equally important, the paper will simultaneously examine the impact of Fulbright program on Moroccan Muslim women grantees themselves.