Doctoral Dissertation Research: Labor Dynamics and Social Memory in Contexts of Economic Transformation

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

Investigators

Abstract

This dissertation project seeks to enhance understanding of the implications of social memory on labor activity, social identities, and forms of political-economic collaboration. Social memory and cultural heritage have been especially significant culturally for communities where mining has occupied a central role in social and economic life. A focus on organizing within those communities improves understanding of what variables have been driving what the U.S. National Labor Relations Board has described as a surge in labor activity. In addition to training a U.S.-based graduate student in the methods of empirical, scientific data collection and analysis, the project improves public understanding of science and the scientific method by facilitating exchanges between practitioners of heritage work, researchers, and other stakeholders focusing on social and labor relations. The doctoral student disseminates findings widely, including in presentations to employment research institutes. Further, this dissertation project advances science through development of a new combination of ethnographic, visual, and archival methods that uses photo elicitation to facilitate participatory analysis of personal and family archives. Through an eighteen-month ethnographic study with mineworker labor organizations and cultural heritage groups, the project investigates how memory impacts labor dynamics in the context of post-industrial labor market restructuring. This project asks to what degree and in what proportion are changing labor dynamics are driven by economic, social, and historical factors. The doctoral student combines participant observation, interviews, and archival research to empirically examine 1) historical narratives of events like labor actions and union hall meetings; 2) actions and discourses at heritage institutions and commemorative events; 3) materials and photographs that people collect in their personal archives, and their interactions with these materials. The data collected will be coded for different demographic and economic activity variables in order to identify what stories people tell, and why, about class solidarity and unionism, and to investigate potential connections between how working-class people remember the past and the investments they have in the present. In doing so, the doctoral dissertation project advances interdisciplinary studies of post-industrial labor markets through a focus on social memory. 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.