Doctoral Dissertation Research: Economies of Representation and Economic Development

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

Investigators

Abstract

University of Michigan doctoral student Katherine Fultz, with the guidance of Dr. Stuart Kirsch, will undertake anthropological research on socioeconomic development and the representational economy, which is the production, circulation, and reception of media objects having to do with development. The project is designed to expand the traditional scope of media analysis to include the Internet; digital forms, such as text messages, cell phones, digital pictures; and informal texts and images, such as posters. While earlier studies have focused on individual media genres, this project will bring them together to address the multimedia nature of contemporary communications. Another innovation of the project is that it will connect rather than isolate producer-focused analyses and consumer-focused analyses and address a range of media types in order to look at the broad spectrum of media engagements and genres that comprise the representational economy affecting development. The research will be conducted in Guatemala using a local mining project as a case study. The researcher will collect data on how community members in the primarily Maya municipalities of Sipakapa and San Miguel Ixtahuacán, Guatemala, understand and reframe discourses about development, environment, and indigenous rights, in relation to media that sustain debate about economic development. By using a multiple-method approach, grounded in a pair of communities intimately affected by a shared mining project, the researcher will trace the relationships between external investment and multiple development discourses, as they are understood and taken up by local people. The Guatemalan context speaks broadly to issues of development in Latin America and around the world, and is exemplary of the ways different stakeholders interact in transnational development contexts. This project will examine how representational economies of development mediate interactions between stakeholders. Because the Mayan languages spoken in the communities include some that are endangered and poorly documented, the researcher will collect archival quality recordings for deposit in appropriate U.S. archives. Funding this project also supports the education of a social scientist.