Doctoral Dissertation Research: Labor Dynamics and Social Memory in Contexts of Economic Transformation

本论文项目旨在增进对社会记忆对劳动活动、社会认同和政治经济合作形式的影响的理解。社会记忆和文化遗产对采矿在社会和经济生活中占据中心地位的社区具有特别重要的文化意义。关注这些社区内部的组织，有助于理解是什么变量推动了美国国家劳工关系委员会（National Labor Relations Board）所说的劳动活动激增。除了训练一名在美国的研究生掌握经验、科学数据收集和分析的方法外，该项目还通过促进遗产工作实践者、研究人员和其他关注社会和劳动关系的利益相关者之间的交流，提高公众对科学和科学方法的理解。博士生广泛传播研究成果，包括向就业研究机构做报告。此外，本论文项目通过发展民族志、视觉和档案方法的新组合来推进科学，这些方法使用照片启发来促进个人和家庭档案的参与性分析。通过对矿工劳工组织和文化遗产团体进行为期18个月的民族志研究，该项目调查了记忆如何在后工业劳动力市场重组的背景下影响劳动力动态。该项目探讨了经济、社会和历史因素对劳动力动态变化的影响程度和比例。博士研究生结合参与性观察、访谈和档案研究来实证研究：1)劳工行动和工会大厅会议等事件的历史叙述；2)在文物机构和纪念活动中的行动和话语；3)人们在个人档案中收集的材料和照片，以及他们与这些材料的互动。收集的数据将根据不同的人口统计和经济活动变量进行编码，以确定人们讲述的故事，以及为什么，关于阶级团结和工会主义，并调查工人阶级如何记住过去和他们现在的投资之间的潜在联系。在此过程中，博士论文项目通过关注社会记忆来推进后工业劳动力市场的跨学科研究。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This dissertation project seeks to enhance understanding of the implications of social memory on labor activity, social identities, and forms of political-economic collaboration. Social memory and cultural heritage have been especially significant culturally for communities where mining has occupied a central role in social and economic life. A focus on organizing within those communities improves understanding of what variables have been driving what the U.S. National Labor Relations Board has described as a surge in labor activity. In addition to training a U.S.-based graduate student in the methods of empirical, scientific data collection and analysis, the project improves public understanding of science and the scientific method by facilitating exchanges between practitioners of heritage work, researchers, and other stakeholders focusing on social and labor relations. The doctoral student disseminates findings widely, including in presentations to employment research institutes. Further, this dissertation project advances science through development of a new combination of ethnographic, visual, and archival methods that uses photo elicitation to facilitate participatory analysis of personal and family archives. Through an eighteen-month ethnographic study with mineworker labor organizations and cultural heritage groups, the project investigates how memory impacts labor dynamics in the context of post-industrial labor market restructuring. This project asks to what degree and in what proportion are changing labor dynamics are driven by economic, social, and historical factors. The doctoral student combines participant observation, interviews, and archival research to empirically examine 1) historical narratives of events like labor actions and union hall meetings; 2) actions and discourses at heritage institutions and commemorative events; 3) materials and photographs that people collect in their personal archives, and their interactions with these materials. The data collected will be coded for different demographic and economic activity variables in order to identify what stories people tell, and why, about class solidarity and unionism, and to investigate potential connections between how working-class people remember the past and the investments they have in the present. In doing so, the doctoral dissertation project advances interdisciplinary studies of post-industrial labor markets through a focus on social memory.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.