Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Bethlehem Steelworkers: Working Class Families in a Post-Fordist City

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Graduate student Jill A. Schenuum, with the guidance of Dr. David Harvey, will undertake research on former industrial workers and their families in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. These workers were displaced from their industry jobs as Bethlehem transitioned from being an industrial steel town to a town situated within a more flexible political economy. Although there is a robust social science literature on the deindustrialization of the 1980s, there are few follow-up studies of displaced industrial workers. This research addresses that gap.The researcher will focus particularly on how the economic changes altered the social landscape of everyday life in communities, families, and workplaces. She wishes to determine how these alterations at the micro-scale may have produced larger changes in class identity and relationships. She will collect qualitative data through interviews with former steel workers, participant observation in public events, and analysis of media. She will seek to determine how families make sense of the transition; how family forms, household structures, and gender roles influence and have been affected by the changes; and how working class morality and political action are shaped by and possibly shape, community organizations and urban social relations. The research will contribute to social science with a carefully carried out case study of the long-term social effects of deinudstrialization at the local level. It also will help to develop social policy to support workers in transition. In addition, the award supports the education of a social scientist.