Doctoral Dissertation Research: An anthropological exploration of the role of state-sponsored educational initiatives in a context of socioeconomic inequality

Brown University, Providence RI

Investigators

Abstract

Brown University anthropology doctoral student Yana Stainova, advised by Dr. Kay Warren, is researching whether state-sponsored efforts to build moral and ethical communities are successful in reducing violence in contexts of radical socioeconomic inequality. The researcher will focus on the growth and impact of a state-sponsored educational and ethics program that aims to combat socioeconomic marginalization by providing cost-free music education to half a million young people. Envisioning music as a model and enactment of a non-partisan ideal society, this program purports to foster a social concern for others through aesthetic forms. This project asks what significance this collective learning strategy has had in a context marred by violence, socioeconomic inequality, and political polarization. The researcher will be carrying out a year of ethnographic research in the Venezuelan capital, Caracas, and in a lower-middle class neighborhood in the northwestern city of Coro. She will collect two forms of data: (1) the macro-level of state power and forms of governance; and (2) the micro-level of the way learning in this environment cultivates specific kinds of individual and interpersonal experiences. She will employ a variety of qualitative social science research methods including semi-structured interviews with the music program's leadership and teachers, interviews, participant observation, and archival research. Findings from this research will contribute to social science research on the place of ethical and moral questions in everyday life, as well as the formation of new moral communities. The research also will also illuminate the concrete benefits of state funding for the arts as a way of combating extreme socioeconomic segregation and explore the applicability of the program to other countries. Supporting this research also supports the advanced education of a graduate student allowing her to gather data that will be the basis of her doctoral dissertation and future publications.