About CEEL

The Center for the Ethnography of Everyday Life is one of six Alfred P. Sloan centers devoted to encouraging research - through field projects, publication, and training - into everyday work and family life in the United States. Each of the centers has its special focus. At CEEL, we take well-documented changes in the lives of the American Middle Class as indicators of deeper currents in meaning and motivation. We ask how they connect to our senses of relatedness, self, obligation, and character.

The changes surround us: the rise of the two-career family, the juggling of schedules, the fading boundaries between work-time and family-time, work-place and family-place. We tick them off easily in our newspaper accounts and in our daily experience. For those of us at CEEL, committed to research in the convergent traditions of ethnography and documentary, our understanding of these changes is enhanced by a focus on the concrete experiences of real people, places, and lives.

Though our lineages are several and no one CEEL researcher can do it all, we look for inspiration in the engaged social inquiry exemplified by:

the documentary precision and moral intensity of such writers as James Agee, Robert Coles, Lorena Hickok, and George Orwell....
the ethnographic attention to context, history, and narrative of such social scientists as Zora Neale Hurston, Oscar Lewis, Paul Taylor, and W. Lloyd Warner....
the focus on character, personhood, and cultures of virtue that runs from Alexis de Tocqueville through Robert Bellah....
the eye for detail and the ear for sound in W.C. Williams, Thomas McGrath, and Denise Levertov....

Toward these ends, CEEL researchers follow everyday lives. They can be found wherever life is lived - in schools, offices, factories, farms, small towns, suburbs, and urban neighborhoods - observing, recording, and documenting.