Doctoral Dissertation Research: Resilience-Building and Adversity Management in the Post-Welfare United States

University Of Chicago, Chicago IL

Investigators

Abstract

Resilience-Building and Adversity Management in the Post-Welfare United States The research supported by this award investigates ethnographically how people make sense of and manage experiences of adversity in the postwelfare United States, by examining resilience-building initiatives in Flint, Michigan following the city's 2014 water crisis. Over the past two decades, welfare reform in the U.S. has significantly diminished public assistance for marginalized populations. At the same time, "resilience-building" has become a national strategy for enabling communities to withstand, adapt to, or recover from adversity. However, the goals of resilience-building appear paradoxical in contexts like Flint, where the crisis remains ongoing, adversity is chronic, and the imperative to thrive coincides directly with austerity policies that continue to severely decrease welfare provision for residents. This project, which provides funding for the training of a graduate student in anthropology in scientific methods of rigorous data collection and analysis, will examine how the goals of resilience-building intersect with the ways that people experience, understand, and manage adversity in Flint, this project will provide key insight into the relationship between welfare state retrenchment, adversity-management, and collective life in the contemporary U.S. Talia Gordon, a doctoral student at the University of Chicago, will conduct 18 months of ethnographic research in Flint, Michigan, with the oversight of Dr. Eugene Raikhel. A former hub of automotive manufacturing, Flint has become a national symbol of post-industrial decline. The 2014 water crisis drew further attention to the devastating consequences of continued disinvestment by state and federal administrations in an already socioeconomically disadvantaged community. In response to the crisis, the U.S. government expressed a commitment to support Flint's "recovery and resilience." Since 2016, this commitment has materialized in a number of initiatives specifically dedicated to building resilience in Flint. To understand why and to what consequence resilience-building has become the primary strategy for helping individuals and communities manage adversity in the postwelfare U.S., the researcher will conduct participant-observation across an array of sites dedicated to adversity-management in Flint. Findings from these sites will be enriched through ethnographic interviews with residents and other social actors involved in adversity-management practices; contextualized through analyses of discourse at each site; and supplemented by analyses of local news media, curricula, pamphlets, and online sources. The researcher will focus on 1) how resilience-building discourses and practices are enacted; that is, made socially meaningful 2) how these discourses and practices correspond with or diverge from local experiences and understandings of adversity and 3) how local value-frameworks inform adversity management. Findings from this research will contribute to understanding how and to what effects resilience-building discourses and practices are taken up by people in marginalized communities. The research will also contribute to building more robust social scientific understanding of how people experience, manage, and make sense of adversity in postwelfare settings. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.