Doctoral Dissertation Research: Obligation and Relationality in the Wake of Critical Events

博士论文研究：重大事件后的义务和关系

• 批准号: 2241829
• 负责人: Ilana Feldman
• 金额: $ 2.47万
• 依托单位: George Washington University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2023
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2023-01-01 至 2023-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2241829&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Obligation; Relationality

Critical events can catalyze new forms of social relations or anchor new modes of collective life. Critical events (major occurrences, such as natural disasters, conflict, or economic crises that redefine social categories) have typically been explored in the aftermath of isolated incidents. This doctoral dissertation project investigates how people’s sense of obligation to others comes to be defined, experienced, and materialized in the context of multiple critical events that accrue over time. Existing research on obligation focuses on reciprocity and exchange and tends to paint a linear account of how solicitations of obligations form and bind people to one another. This dissertation research will instead attend to the tangled processes through which people’s sense of obligation to others is brought into relief and called into question in the wake of layered critical events. In addition to supporting the training of a doctoral student, the findings from this project will be shared with academic audiences as well as humanitarian and cultural non-governmental organizations.The project traces different modes of response, including assistance and documentation, that people draw on to respond to layers of critical events. This multi-sited ethnography will encompass members of different generations and residents of different locales, and will deploy a combination of semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and oral life history interviews to explore the factors that guide people’s responses to events, how sociality and community boundaries become (re)configured as a result of these responses, and how meanings of critical events change as they accrue over time. In doing so, this broadens the spatial and temporal scope of the anthropological study of obligation and contributes to social science by better understanding the processes and forces through which boundaries of community are made and remade.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.

关键事件可以催化新形式的社会关系或锚集体生活的新模式。关键事件（重大事件，如自然灾害，冲突或重新定义社会类别的经济危机）通常在孤立事件之后进行探索。这个博士论文项目调查了人们对他人的义务感是如何在随着时间的推移而积累的多个关键事件的背景下被定义，体验和实现的。关于义务的现有研究侧重于互惠和交换，并倾向于描绘一个线性帐户的义务的恳求如何形成和约束人们彼此。本论文的研究，而不是出席的纠结的过程中，人们的义务感，以他人的救济，并呼吁在分层的关键事件之后的问题。除了支持培训一名博士生外，该项目的研究结果将与学术界以及人道主义和文化非政府组织分享，该项目追踪了人们用来应对一系列重大事件的不同应对模式，包括援助和文件。这种多地点的民族志将包括不同世代的成员和不同地区的居民，并将部署半结构化访谈，参与者观察和口述生活史访谈的组合，以探索引导人们对事件的反应的因素，如何社会性和社区边界成为（重新）配置作为这些反应的结果，以及关键事件的意义如何随着时间的推移而变化。通过这样做，这拓宽了人类学义务研究的空间和时间范围，并通过更好地理解社区边界的形成和重塑的过程和力量，为社会科学做出了贡献。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估来支持。