Doctoral Dissertation Research: Mobile Farming Families of Southern Appalachia and the Mexican Bajio

博士论文研究：阿巴拉契亚南部和墨西哥巴吉奥的移动农业家庭

• 批准号: 1558517
• 负责人: ANN KINGSOLVER
• 金额: $ 0.85万
• 依托单位: University of Kentucky Research Foundation
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2016
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2016-03-15 至 2018-02-28
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1558517&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Mobile; Farming

North American agricultural livelihoods have gone through significant transitions since the late twentieth century. Changes include the restructuring of food systems so that local farming economies are increasingly tied to global networks and processes. One somewhat surprising response on the part of local food producers has been the rise of binational family-based farming enterprises, which, despite being small to midscale ventures, successfully coordinate across state lines to facilitate vertically integrated operations, mitigate inequities, and access produce markets. The research supported by this award will investigate how this occurs: how do local family fruit and vegetable producers utilize global networks, coordinate transregional projects, and contribute to food system circulations? And what role do traditional modes of organizing family farms, such as kinship networks, play in contemporary farming operations? The research will be carried out by University of Kentucky doctoral student Mary Elizabeth W. Schmid, with direction from anthropologist Dr. Ann E. Kingsolver, in the western North Carolina region of southern Appalachia, with comparative research in other southeastern U.S. states and Mexico. Schmid will document family and enterprise histories, provisioning strategies, forms of relatedness, cultural practices, and decision-making processes to determine how members draw on family and non-family relations to enable strategic production, distribution, and marketing coordination across time and space. Her mixed methods approach will include archival research, participant observation, interviewing, social network analysis, ethnographic mapping, and qualitative analysis of textual data. She will map family and enterprise networks, temporal cycles, transnational kinship circuit flows, and the social organization of fruit and vegetable production and marketing. Findings from this research will contribute to understanding the functioning of small to midscale fruit and vegetable production enterprises in the contemporary economy and the social and economic effects of agricultural policies intended to regulate this sector.

自二十世纪末以来，北美农业生计经历了重大转变。变化包括粮食系统的重组，使当地农业经济越来越多地与全球网络和进程联系在一起。当地粮食生产商的一个有点令人惊讶的反应是，以家庭为基础的两国农业企业的崛起，尽管这些企业是中小型企业，但成功地跨州协调，以促进垂直整合的经营，缓解不平等，并进入农产品市场。该奖项支持的研究将调查这种情况是如何发生的：当地家庭水果和蔬菜生产者如何利用全球网络，协调跨区域项目，并为食品系统流通做出贡献？而传统的家庭农场组织模式，如亲属关系网络，在当代农业经营中扮演着什么角色？这项研究将由肯塔基大学的博士生玛丽·伊丽莎白·W·施密德进行，人类学家安·E·金索弗博士将在阿巴拉契亚南部的北卡罗来纳州西部进行指导，并与美国东南部其他州和墨西哥进行比较研究。施密德将记录家族和企业的历史、供应战略、亲属关系的形式、文化实践和决策过程，以确定成员如何利用家族和非家族关系，实现跨越时间和空间的战略性生产、分销和营销协调。她的混合方法将包括档案研究、参与者观察、访谈、社会网络分析、民族志地图和文本数据的定性分析。她将绘制家庭和企业网络、时间周期、跨国亲属关系环流以及水果和蔬菜生产和销售的社会组织。这项研究的结果将有助于理解中小型水果和蔬菜生产企业在当代经济中的作用，以及旨在规范这一部门的农业政策的社会和经济影响。