Doctoral Dissertation Research: Vocational Education, Economic Development, and Socioeconomic Mobility

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This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2). Vocational education, a descendant of industrial education, plays a key role in the approaches of some U.S. states to economic development. Advocates of vocational education argue that it provides a trained workforce for industry and a path to economic mobility for individuals. Critics question whether the kinds of vocational opportunities offered continue, as they did in the early twentieth century, to be concentrated low-paying jobs, thereby reinforcing inequalities and stifling socioeconomic mobility. This doctoral dissertation research project explores how ideologies about vocational education have changed, and what impact those changes have on economic development. In addition to providing funding for the training of a graduate student in anthropology in the methods of empirical, scientific data collection and analysis, data and findings will be shared with economic development professionals, chambers of commerce, and vocational education and workforce development administrators. Workshops on social science literacy will be developed in cooperation with the vocational education programs at an HBCU, broadening the participation of underrepresented groups in science.Through a study of economic opportunity zones in Lowcountry South Carolina, this project investigates a) the foundations of ideological formation in late nineteenth and early twentieth century industrial education; and b) whether those ideologies have been transformed, and if so how, in contemporary vocational education and workforce development policies and programs. Methods include semi-structured interviews, life history interviews, and participant observation with Lowcountry residents who are involved with vocational education programs and economic development initiatives. The linguistic anthropological techniques of discourse and narrative analysis will be employed to evaluate and assess ideological formation and transformation. The project contributes to educational anthropology, political economic theories about the drivers of and obstacles to development, and linguistic anthropological theories about language ideologies.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.