Relationships Among Multiple Livelihoods and Human, Social, and Cultural Capital

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This project involves the research of a cultural anthropologist from East Carolina University, studying the transformation of work through multiple livelihoods. The project will study Mexican and Jamaican transnational workers carrying special temporary worker visas who work in the seafood processing and tourist labor markets of the mid-Atlantic region of the US, employed in seasonal jobs formerly staffed primarily by local women. The increasing reliance on foreign labor and decreasing reliance on native labor signals a convergence of the working conditions and opportunities of workers in the Mid-Atlantic region with those of workers from Jamaica and Mexico. The project will examine the social network ties which enable workers to obtain public and private assistance, in their home as well as their host country, by focusing on a sample of US, Mexican, and Jamaican workers. The specific hypotheses to be tested deal with the importance of formal and informal economic and political activities in the home countries as affected by migrant labor experiences, as well as the effects of specific work experiences on the cultural models of workers regarding work and social opportunities. Combining in-depth open-ended interviewing and local historical research and the more structured measures of cultural consensus testing and sorting tasks, the research will determine the character and work experience of workers in developed and underdeveloped regions; examine the roles of government in this process; determine how the seasonal labor market experience influences the formation of human social and cultural capital; and explore the relation of cultural understandings and expectations and social-cultural capital. This research will advance our understanding of the human capital of transnational workers and the new knowledge will be of great interest to planners and public policy makers