Doctoral Dissertation Research: Globalization, Gender and Inequality in Rural Greece

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0211303SiderThis research project focuses on changes that have occurred over the last two decades concerning the social organization of labor in agricultural communities of Greece. Since the early 1980's Greek agriculture has become increasingly dependent on immigrant labor. At the same time women, who were traditionally an important source of labor in the subsistence economies of Greek villages, have been increasingly incorporated into the formal economy. Both these developments reflect the growing integration of Greece into transnational and global networks of exchange, particularly since its entry into the European Union, and have often been represented as the modernization and democratization of the Greek countryside. However, these developments also represent a fundamental transformation in the reproduction of social inequality from an older discursive framework centered on gender and kinship to a newer discourse centered on ethnicity and citizenship. This research project will examine shifting discourses of inequality in a rural Greek community as it has changed from a dependence on gendered, kin-organized labor to immigrant labor. Using methods of participant-observation and discourse analysis, the student will map out the relationship between the construction of gender and national ideologies and the mobilization of agricultural labor. The student will collect data both on how people think about inequality and on how social stratification is organized in order to uncover the processes by which social inequality is being reproduced at the local level. The project will advance our understanding of contemporary processes of globalization and their implications for local social organization. It will also advance our understanding of the roles of gender and ethnicity in Mediterranean social organization.