CEEL Postdoctoral Opportunities

Postdoctoral Program in the Ethnography of Everyday Life at Michigan

The researchers at Michigan's Center for the Ethnography of Everyday Life are united by their conviction that Americans live today at a watershed in our understandings of work and family as key cultural symbols and anchors of personal identity. A full exploration of these changes requires ethnographic and documentary approaches that can both complement and go beyond the statistics and abstractions of social science. Our aim is to enter both scholarly and popular conversations about working families by focusing on the immediacy and concreteness of people's everyday lives.

The postdoctoral fellowship program offers the opportunity for formal and informal training and independent ethnographic field research within a larger framework designed to investigate these changes in a variety of community and work settings. Center activities are concerned with ethnographic investigations into the changing meanings of work and family as cultural categories; with the processes of stress and reconfiguration of meanings created by increasing divergence between behavior and older cultural models; with new behaviors emerging in workplace and home in response to these changes; and with the notions of character, the good life, and individual identity that underlie people's grappling with these changes.

In addition to the usual scholarly writing, we encourage writing and publication for audiences beyond the academy. We look for immediacy, attention to real people, real dilemmas and their resolution.

Postdoctoral Program Benefits

The postdoctoral program is designed as a two year fellowship (with second year continuation subject to acceptable performance in the first year) and offers participants:

Opportunities to conduct independent ethnographic fieldwork within a larger research framework in collaboration with a community of experienced researchers, other postdoctoral fellows, and predoctoral trainees.

Opportunities for collaborative research and writing with faculty mentors.

Regular seminars on work/family and associated cultural issues.
Opportunities for specialized training in ethnographic techniques as needed.

Travel support for participation in national and international meetings on family and work related issues.

Resources for analysis and write-up leading to publication.
Postdoctoral Candidates

Applications are invited from candidates at the postdoctoral level who are interested in pursuing ethnographic approaches to issues related to the intersection of work and family and who have training in anthropology, business administration, economics, human development, industrial and labor relations, psychology, sociology, and related fields. Candidates with prior ethnographic field experience outside of the United States are encouraged to apply. The focus of the fellowships is on the ethnography of everyday life as it connects with American family and work cultures. Among the orienting themes for research are: (1) Cultures of identity: Negotiating definitions of work, family, and person; (2) Cultures of obligation across generations; (3) Socialization within shifting contexts of work, family, and person; (4) Civic and religious cultures in a world of working families.

Program Structure

The Center for the Ethnography of Everyday Life expects to maintain four postdoctoral fellows at a given time. Each fellow will be awarded an initial 12 month award with a strong presumption that a subsequent 12 months will be awarded subject to acceptable participation in the first year. Candidates must have completed the Ph.D. before beginning the fellowship and must have research interests that will involve them in ethnographic investigations of issues related to the interface between work and family cultures in the United States. Although the fellow's ethnographic work will be autonomous, it must fit within a broader research framework designed to explore different aspects of change in the cultural definitions of work and family at different places within the Midwestern United States.

Each fellow, in consultation with the program director, will design a program that fits her or his needs and interests within the larger framework. In addition, during fellowship periods apart from actual ethnographic fieldwork, all fellows will participate in:

Candidates accepted for Center postdoctoral fellowships will be expected to:

Wider Research Links and Opportunities

Center faculty are affiliated with numerous departments and colleges throughout the University of Michigan including anthropology, economics, psychology, and sociology, the School of Business Administration, the School of Social Work, and the Institute for Social Research, the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, and the Population Studies Center. The center is directed by Tom Fricke of the Department of Anthropology and the Institute for Social Research. Postdoctoral fellows have the opportunity to participate in ongoing research initiatives through links with faculty at all of these locations.

Application Requirements

Fellowships include a stipend and full benefits for each year of fellowship, a designated research fund for each year of fellowship, and office space within the center. Screening of applications to occur on a rolling basis until positions are filled.

Please send letter of inquiry by regular mail indicating preferred starting date, curriculum vitae, brief statement of research interests, a sample of your written work, and names of three references to:

Tom Fricke, Director, Center for the Ethnography of Everyday Life
Institute for Social Research
426 Thompson Street
The University of Michigan
Ann Arbor MI 48106-1248.




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