Dissertation Research: Gender, Language and the Creation of Kinship at a Wyoming Coal Mine

Regents Of The University Of Michigan - Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor MI

Investigators

Abstract

Under the supervision of Dr. Stuart A. Kirsch, graduate student Jessica Smith will conduct research on modes of corporate control and worker response at a non-union, open-pit coal mining operation in Wyoming. Smith's research will reconsider previous research that found that increasing production pressures automatically accelerate processes of alienation by separating workers from the products of their labor and preventing the formation of social relationships with their coworkers. Instead, based on her preliminary research, she suggests that in the absence of unions, work relationships are managed on both sides by the strategic use of fictive kinship. The company tries to draw workers into company families and miners respond by forming their own work families. The research is designed to verify that miners do form work families and to investigate the proposition that these relationships challenge both the processes of alienation and the attempts made by corporate officials to imprint their own visions of appropriate kin relationships on their workers. She also will investigate the source of misleading popular and academic stereotypes of mine labor. Three research methods will be utilized to investigate these questions: long-term participant observation at the mine, including ethnographic interviews and life histories; detailed linguistic analysis of workplace communications (such as radio transmissions); and media focus groups with mining families. This research project is important because it will fill a gap in what is known about worker/owner and worker/worker relationships at mining operations, a key concern for policy makers charged with supporting mining while assuring worker safety. Most previous studies have been of underground mines, all-male mining operations, and unionized mines. This study will be of an above ground, non-union mine that employs 20 percent women. The project will also train a graduate student in qualitative research methods.