Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Competing Projects over the Social Landscape in Southern Bahia (Brazil)

研究生Jonathan DeVore将在Webb Keane博士的指导下，研究土地改革政策及其在多个利益相关者的背景下对社会经济平等的影响。这项研究将通过对巴西巴伊亚州南部几个新的土地改革社区的民族志研究来进行，在那里，无地穷人、种植园主、环保主义者和旅游工作者竞相在规划社会和自然景观方面占据主导地位。要了解不同的社会群体希望和努力实现什么样的世界，需要注意影响这些不同群体活动的伦理和审美规范、理想、价值观和未来方向的范围，以及群体本身是如何构成和分类的。因此，本研究的方法论取向是民族志，需要长期参与和与当地人的日常互动。研究设计还结合了半结构化访谈、社区调查和改编版本的光声方法。这项研究的结果将有助于学者和决策者之间的辩论，他们关心确定最公平和最有效的土地改革政策。这将有助于研究国家政策与地方社会结构之间关系的社会理论。这项研究也支持了社会科学家的教育。

Graduate student Jonathan DeVore, under the direction of Dr. Webb Keane, will undertake research on land reform policies and their effects on socioeconomic equality in contexts where there are multiple stakeholders. The research will be carried out through an ethnographic study of several new land reform communities in southern Bahia, Brazil, where landless poor, plantation owners, environmentalists, and tourism workers vie for primacy in planning for the social and physical landscape. To understand what kind of worlds the different social groups hope for and strive to bring about requires attention to the range of ethical and aesthetic norms, ideals, values and future orientations that influence these different groups' activities, as well as to how the groups themselves are constituted and categorized. Therefore, the methodological orientation of this research is ethnographic, entailing long-term engagement and daily interactions with local people. The research design also incorporates semi-structured interviews, community surveys, and an adapted version of photovoice methodology. The results of this research will contribute to debates among academics and policy makers who are concerned with defining agrarian reform policies that will be most equitable and effective. It will contribute to social theory about the relationship between national policy and local social structure. The research also supports the education of a social scientist.