CEEL Projects

Currently Funded Projects

Lara Descartes
CEEL Graduate Student Affiliate; 7th Year Graduate Student in Anthropology; Working with Conrad Kottak. Research topic: "Media Representations of Work and Family Life in Middle America." Lara's own dissertation fieldwork was completed on the topic of media representations of family life in the Los Angeles area. She works as a research assistant on Conrad Kottak' media, work, and family study described above and will be involved in publications and presentations on that project.

Gillian Feeley-Harnik
Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Michigan. Active Research: "The Ethnography of Creation." This work is a study of how transformations in family and work are related to political-ecological change. The problem of the book is how radical transformations in relations between human beings, land, and animals in Great Britain and America in the mid-l9th century affected the ways that people responded to debates over "Divine Creation" and "Natural Selection," and how they began to rethink what Charles Darwin called "that mystery of mysteries": the very origin and nature of life itself. The project is organized around a comparison between Charles Darwin (1809-1882) and Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-1881), founder of the study of kinship (comparative family relations) in Anthropology, and an ethnographically-minded naturalist on the side. Both Darwin and Morgan argued that "descent is the hidden bond of connection" linking all forms of life (Darwin's words). Both drew on biblical language to articulate social, biological, and moral concerns they hoped to resolve through science. The work explores debates in Anthropology and Biology about how to conceptualize kinship, or relatedness, as well as debates concerning the relationship of religion and science. The ultimate goals of the work are these: to illuminate how people grasp the "mystery of life" in their everyday social practices, in reckoning who is kin to them, how they are connected to other creatures living and dead, and to the places where they live and work; and to document how popular practices of kinship and ecology in 19th-century Great Britain and America contributed to the new sciences of kinship and ecology.

Tom Fricke
(Center Director), Professor, Department of Anthropology & Senior Research Scientist, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan. Active research: "Rural Parents & Urban Children; Place, Work, Migration, and the Natal Home". This ongoing research takes the family as an extended network and explores the transformation of work & family culture across generations through ethnographic work. The research sites include a small Great Plains farm and ranch community and the communities to which middle class working children have moved in pursuit of their own careers. The generational shift in contexts of work culture provides an ideal situation for exploring such themes as the negotiation of intergenerational family & work obligations across space and time, changing conceptualizations of work, character, identity and place, and continuities in work culture across generations.

Todd Goodsell
CEEL Predoctoral Fellow, Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology. Research topic: "First-Time Fatherhood: Negotiating Roles in Work and Family" I do research on community, family, narrative, and social norms. This project centers on the question of what it means to be a "good father" within the American middle class. Socialization is not a one-time experience and by no means does it need to be formal training. Rather, the American middle-class experience builds expectations of adult roles from the time that children are very young. However, the messages that we get through everyday life tend to be vague and often contradictory. One way that we make sense of them is by constructing narratives - stories that surround a concept and give it significance through the relationships necessarily contained within each narrative. I conducted a community ethnography in 2001 and 2002 in the St. Louis area. While there, I gathered stories about fatherhood from men and women who were just becoming parents for the first time and I use data from the history and the experience of everyday life in St. Louis to help me interpret them.

Britt Halvorson
My developing dissertation project in the Center for the Ethnography of Everyday Life focuses on the significance and value of international Christian missions for Protestants living in the American Midwest. In particular, I plan to explore how and why mission work and the remembered history of American Protestant missions acquires religious significance for American Protestants. What has it meant and what does it mean today to be a "world Christian"? My proposed course of research involves ethnographic work with participants of several interconnected mission prayer groups in Minneapolis/St. Paul and archival research at the Luther Theological Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota, the primary training institution for international American Lutheran missionaries since the late nineteenth century. Through future research, I wish to examine how visual, written, and spoken communications with missionaries; the meanings of religious work and spiritual relatedness; and the transmission of material objects connected to international Christian missionization have factored and continue to figure centrally in the semiotic process of religious experience among Protestants living in the American Midwest.

Sallie Han
CEEL Pre-Doctoral Fellow; 1st Year Graduate Student in Anthropology; working with Tom Fricke. Her interests are in gender, work and the body in Middle Class suburbs. Planning on dissertation research in suburban Detroit area. Currently, Sallie is at work on her dissertation project: "The Baby in the Belly: Pregnancy Practices as Kin and Person-Making Processes in the Contemporary United States". The dissertation will examine how pregnant women, through their everyday activities such as eating, exercise, prenatal care, shopping, and talk, actively engage in the construction and constitution of familial roles, subjects, and relationships.

Brian Hoey
A Research Affiliate at CEEL. Research Topic: "Community Building Among Lifestyle Migrants: Changes in the Culture of Family and Work in America's Post-Industrial Middleclass". The Life-style Migration Project entailed two years of community-based fieldwork in rapidly gentrifying lakeside communities of Northwest Lower Michigan. The project was concerned with exploring the phenomenon of life-style migration as a form of non-economic, urban-rural migration that has led to the sudden, often unexpected growth of formerly declining non-metropolitan areas. This migration is taken as an indication of shifting values and priorities in middle-class America and as part of broader social changes in the culture of family and work. The purpose of this research is to understand how downsizing, restructuring, and the rise of contingent work as part of post-industrial changes has forced some individuals and families to question status quo notions of the good and to imagine themselves and their communities in different ways. What are the choices people are led to make about both where and how they wish to live? Life-style migrants relocate beyond traditional centers of population and business based on personal considerations of quality of life. At the same time, a desire for sense of community and an increasingly global economy that demands place-based economic competitiveness drives places to market themselves in new ways to attract and retain families.

Conrad Kottak
Professor and Chair, Department of Anthropology. Active research: "The Relationship of Media to Work and Family Issues among the Middle Class." This research will examine how middle class parents interpret and use representations of work and family in the media to think about work and family issues in their own lives. This work builds on previous research by the investigator. The task of this study is to explore which media sources the adults in middle class families make use of, whether television, radio, print, etc., and then to investigate in what ways these resources are employed to think about and understand their own work-family strategies and situations. The site selected for this research is a middle class community near Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Collaborator: Lara Descartes

Lawrence Root
Professor, School of Social Work, and Director, Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations, University of Michigan. Developing a project having to do with blue collar middle class solidarity networks.

Elizabeth Rudd
Sociology, University of California, Berkeley. "Family Leave in the American Middle Class". This research explores the role of taking leave from work among the set of practices available for balancing work and family goals in the United States today. The research will focus on instances of taking time out from work in order to meet a family need in a sample of Midwestern, middle class American families. Such instances may include formal and informal practices involving absences of variable duration, including brief absences to take a child to the doctor and longer absences from the workplace, such as the 12 weeks of unpaid family leave allowed under the Family and Medical Leave Act. Instances of leave-taking will be examined because they are situations in which work-family conflicts are resolved in favor of the family. In-depth, qualitative interviews with American, dual-career couples in which at least one partner has taken leave from work in order to meet a family goal or need will be conducted to discover the motivations for and consequences of leave-taking from the point of view of subordinates, and family members will also be interviewed. Analysis of the interview will investigate how the involved parties identify and construct work-family conflicts and how leave-takers and others weigh the conflicting demands experienced around leave-taking. This research contributes to our knowledge of cultural categories of "work" and "family", the socially available options for reconciling work and family goals in the American middle class, and the consequences of taking time out from work for individuals, families, and workplaces.

Arland Thornton
Professor, Department of Sociology & Research Scientist, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan. Background work on shifting work/family values using longitudinal survey data with objective of launching ethnographic project.