Whether implicit or explicit in nature, one of the basic characteristics of an anthropological approach is that it is comparative.  My research interests are varied and based on two primary fieldwork experiences conducted during my doctoral training. One is located on the other side of the globe and deals with issues in the relocation of mostly landless poor, culture and identity politics, and post-colonial nationalism and nation building. The other is located here in the United States among middle-class working families and addresses the impact of post-industrial economic and social changes on the cultural meanings of person and place. Although different, these projects share important traits which express enduring intellectual interests including my desire to conduct community or organizational based research and a focus on issues of migration and relocation, community building and participation, personhood and place, narrative constructions and identity, and the personal negotiations between work, family, and self in different social and historical contexts.

My first major research project involved a year of fieldwork in Sulawesi, Indonesia in 1998. This research was conducted in four government-sponsored relocation settlements all part of the program known as “transmigration” that originally began during the Dutch colonial period. In this community-based work, I employed both qualitative and more quantitative approaches. I concentrated my participant-observation, in-depth interviewing and social-surveys in a single village as a primary field site. In order to test my early findings against other cases while comparing ethnographically interesting differences and similarities with other locations, I extended data collection into three other nearby settlements – each with a unique set of circumstances for their establishment and continued development as communities.

My dissertation fieldwork entailed two years of community-based fieldwork in the rapidly growing lakeside communities of Northwest Lower Michigan centered in Traverse City. The project was concerned with exploring the phenomenon of life-style migration – a form of non-economic, urban to rural migration that has led to the sudden, often unexpected growth of formerly declining non-metropolitan areas.

I value the depth and breadth of my research interests and experience.  Although at first glance the "distance" between these two projects and their sites appears too great to offer much in the way of comparative insight, this is not the case.  My work with Indonesian transmigrants offered insight into how I might interpret experiences of relocating professionals as life-style migrants. Specifically, transmigrants spoke of how they used the relocation to selectively edit out or enhance certain personal characteristics and even cultural elements of their ethnic group. I was able to reveal a similar process among life-style migrants who relocated in order to bring about what they felt was a necessary break from established routine. They used relocation to redefine priorities and, in many cases, to get in touch with what they describe as a more authentic self.

The value of ethnographic research conducted in a variety of social, cultural, and physical contexts is that it can encourage us as social scientists to be open to possibilities and to imagine new ways of thinking about what might appear too familiar to be worthy of in-depth consideration. This is another reason why I value the ethnography of everyday life. It is in neglected details of day-to-day life that real insight into the meaning of social and cultural change is most powerfully and relevantly expressed.

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