Doctoral Dissertation Research: Deindustrialization and Security in Rural America

在过去的十年里，分散在美国中西部的田园诗般的乡村小镇已经被全国对去工业化、吸毒和自杀的担忧所取代。随着美国中西部的去工业化，这些社区内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。该项目为培训人类学研究生提供资金，使其掌握经验性科学数据收集和分析方法，并将调查安全在衡量农村小城镇未来潜力方面所起的作用。为了了解最近工业和经济结构调整的变化所产生的影响，该项目将探讨这些全球进程如何反映在构成家园的物体中，并说明其中社会文化动态的变化性质。Briel Kobak在芝加哥大学的Shannon Dawdy博士的监督下，将探索与安全问题相关的消费者行为的动机因素，以及与消费，收集和管理提供人身安全的对象相关的重要社会和文化身份。以经典的分析方法的对象传记，本研究将进行跟踪和周围的一个小镇在南部印第安纳州的安全对象的流通，并询问如何某些危险和不安全感的阐述和补救沿着的方式。使用民族志，考古和档案的方法的混合方法，研究人员问这些对象在提供安全感，是物质，情感和经济方面发挥什么作用。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有关，该项目将安全研究从正式的制度框架研究转移到更本地的，他们所经历的环境中。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。

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.