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

研究生乔纳森·德沃尔将在韦伯·基恩博士的指导下，研究土地改革政策及其在有多个利益相关者的情况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进行人种学研究来进行，在那里，没有土地的穷人、种植园主、环保主义者和旅游工作者在社会和自然景观的规划中争夺优先地位。要了解不同社会群体希望并努力创造什么样的世界，需要注意影响这些不同群体活动的伦理和审美规范、理想、价值观和未来取向的范围，以及这些群体本身是如何构成和归类的。因此，这项研究的方法论取向是人种学，需要与当地人进行长期接触和日常互动。研究设计还包括半结构化访谈、社区调查和修改后的PhotoVoice方法。这项研究的结果将有助于学术界和政策制定者之间的辩论，他们关心如何确定最公平和最有效的土地改革政策。这将有助于关于国家政策与地方社会结构之间关系的社会理论。这项研究还支持社会科学家的教育。

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.