Doctoral Dissertation Research: Deindustrialization and Security in Rural America

在过去的十年里，对散布在美国中西部的小乡村城镇的田园诗般的描绘，已经被对去工业化、吸毒和自杀的全国性担忧所取代。随着美国中西部的去工业化，这些社区中的个人采取了一系列措施，以确保他们的经济、生理和社区福祉的安全。该项目为人类学研究生的实证、科学数据收集和分析方法的培训提供资金，将调查安全在评估农村小城镇的未来潜力方面所发挥的作用。为了了解最近工业和经济结构调整的活生生的影响，该项目将探索这种全球过程如何反映在构成房屋的物品中，并讲述其中社会文化动态的变化性质。在芝加哥大学Shannon Dawdy博士的指导下，Briel Kobak将探索与安全问题相关的消费者行为的动机因素，以及哪些重要的社会和文化认同与消费、收藏和管理提供人身安全的物品有关。采用对象传记的经典分析方法，这项研究将通过追踪南印第安纳州一个小镇内和周围的安全对象的流通情况来进行，并询问在此过程中某些危险和不安全是如何阐明和补救的。使用人种学、考古学和档案学方法的混合方法，研究人员询问这些物品在提供物质、情感和经济的安全感方面发挥了什么作用。通过调查安全实践，因为它们在历史上也与个人消费者行为相关，该项目将安全研究从正式的制度框架研究转移到更本地化的、日常生活的背景下，在那里他们得到了经验。该项目将对安全理论以及围绕消费和商品的经济人类学辩论做出重大贡献。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.