Doctoral Dissertation Research: Deindustrialization and Security in Rural America

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Over the past decade, idyllic depictions of small rural towns scattered across the American Midwest have been overtaken by national concerns over deindustrialization, drug addiction, and suicide. With the deindustrialization of the Midwestern United States, individuals within these communities have taken a range of measures to ensure the security of their economic, physiological, and community wellbeing. This project, which provides funding for the training of a graduate student in anthropology in the methods of empirical, scientific data collection and analysis, will investigate what role security plays in gauging the potential that the future holds for small rural towns. To understand the lived effects of recent shifts in industry and economic restructuring, the project will explore how such global processes are reflected in the objects that make up homes, and speak to the changing nature of sociocultural dynamics therein. Briel Kobak, under the supervision of Dr. Shannon Dawdy of the University of Chicago, will explore what factors motivate consumer behavior as it relates to issues of security, and what significant social and cultural identities are associated with the consumption, collection, and curation of objects that afford personal safety. Taking the classic analytical approach of the object biography, this research will be conducted by tracing the circulation of security objects in and around a small town in Southern Indiana, and asking how certain dangers and insecurities are articulated and remediated along the way. Using a mixed approach of ethnographic, archaeological, and archival methods, the researcher asks what role these objects play in terms of providing a sense of security that is material, affective, and economic. By investigating practices of security as they have historically also become related to individual consumer behavior, the project moves studies of security beyond the study of formal institutional frameworks, to the more local, quotidian contexts where they are experienced. The project will make significant contributions to theories of security, and economic anthropological debates around consumption and commodities.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.