Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Macroeconomic Restructuring and Changing Middle Class Identities in a Small American City

研究生Alison D. Goebel在Alejandro Lugo博士的指导下，将研究宏观经济结构调整如何重新配置美国一个小城市的中产阶级白人文化。由于种族和阶级作为文化类别和生活经验相互影响，研究人员假设去工业化、全球化和经济改革正在动摇中产阶级的地位。这反过来可能会改变种族身份和特权的主流观念。其他研究也记录了纽约和洛杉矶等全球城市种族和阶级观念的变化。这将是在较小的区域性城市地区调查这些重要社会问题的首批研究之一。这项研究将在俄亥俄州的曼斯菲尔德进行，这是一个拥有51,000居民的小工业化城市。为了记录白人种族和中产阶级身份的差异，研究人员将住在三个不同的社区。她将通过参与者观察、日常谈话分析、非结构化和半结构化的录音访谈以及绘图练习来收集有关白人和有色人种各种经历的数据。这项研究将有助于宏观经济结构调整对社会影响的社会科学理论，并有助于更好地了解当今美国种族认同的认知方面的变化。这项研究还将支持社会科学家的教育。

Graduate student Alison D. Goebel, supervised by Dr. Alejandro Lugo, will investigate how macroeconomic restructuring is reconfiguring middle class white culture in a small American city. Because race and class inform each other as cultural categories and in lived experiences, the researcher hypothesizes that deindustrialization, globalization, and economic reforms are destabilizing middle class status. This in turn may change dominant notions of racial identity and privilege. Other research has documented changing conceptions of race and class in global cities like New York and Los Angeles. This will be one of the first studies to investigate these important social issues in a smaller, regional urban area. The research will be conducted in Mansfield, Ohio, a small deindustrializing city of 51,000 inhabitants. To document differences within white racial and middle class identities, the researcher will live in three different neighborhoods. She will collect data on the variety of experiences of whites and people of color through participant-observation, analyses of everyday talk, unstructured and semi-structured recorded interviews, and mapping exercises. The research will contribute to social science theory on the societal effects of macro-economic restructuring and to a better understanding of the changing cognitive dimensions of racial identity in the United States today. The research also will support the education of a social scientist.