You may begin exploring my ethnographic fieldwork by connecting directly to information on research projects through the links provided below. These dedicated project pages give more detailed glimpses as well as study area maps.

Therapeutic Uses of Place in the Intentional Space of Purposive Community

Preliminary Stages ... Northern Michigan Asylum & Village at Grand Traverse Commons

Summary: This project is in the preliminary stages of background research and planning. I intend to conduct both archival and ethnographic research to consider some of the different ways that "place" is and may used therapeutically by individuals and groups. The role of environment in shaping the quality of public health and civic life is the center of an emerging area of inquiry at the intersection of both academic and applied interests. Although the field of public health, and especially environmental health, has documented the negative health effects and risks to the physical person associated with particular places such as industrial sites, there has been comparatively little consideration of the health promoting or creating role of place in human physical and mental health. This research will explore the therapeutic use of place within the intentional space of purposively created community. I have rooted this work in the particular historical trajectory of the Northern Michigan Asylum, from mental hospital in the 1880s, to its 1980s closing, and now to its recent adaptive-reuse as "neo-traditional community." Built during a period of sweeping social, cultural and structural changes in late 19th century America, the Asylum was founded on the reformist "moral" or "milieu" treatment approach of Thomas Kirkbride. Kirkbride espoused creating self-sustaining communities where the built environment together with a cultivated countryside became not only a sanctuary but also a healing instrument, a therapeutic landscape used to holistically restore health in persons psychically and physically unmoored by the chaos of modern life. Fieldwork will consider in what ways the intentional space of place-based community created for therapeutic purposes seen in projects ranging from the 19th century "moral treatment" asylum to a variety of communitarian experiments throughout U.S. history are mirrored in today's so-called new urbanism. By taking an historical and ethnographic perspective, this research promises to offer an important context for evaluating current planning proposals to create “healthy places” for work and family life.

New Work Frontiers:  Free Agents in the ‘Flexible’ New Economy

Dec 2004 - Sept 2006 ... Southeastern Michigan, United States of America

Summary: This project considers forms of ‘New Work,’ alternative arrangements of work and family life, explored by so-called free-agents of the New Economy based on flexibility. This project will reveal how certain individuals and groups are exploring, tentatively at first perhaps, unfamiliar landscapes of New Work as a kind of frontier of social and economic arrangements thus helping to redefine the meaning, purpose and place of work in personal and communal life. As pioneers of an emerging post-industrial world, how are some of today’s free-agents engaged in a kind of “frontiering” as they seek to find or create good work that has intrinsic value and allows them to experience a sense of dignity, self-respect and purpose? At the same time, how are they also challenging the presumptions of a frontier mind that characterizes the cultural history of America in their effort to redefine the relationships between work, family, community and self?
 

Changing Places: Life-style Migration, Refuge, and the Quest for Potential Selves in the Midwest's Post-industrial Middle Class

Feb 2000 - Dec 2002 ... Grand Traverse Region, Northwest Lower Peninsula of Michigan, United States of America.

Summary: This project explores present-day social and structural transitions through examining the meaning of relocation in middle-class working families away from metropolitan areas to growing rural communities high in natural amenities. This relocation is a manner of negotiating building tension between personal experience with material demands in pursuit of a livelihood within the flexible, contingent new economy and cultural conventions for the good family and community life as a basis for defining individual character. Accounts of life-style migrants are part of a larger moral story of what constitutes the good life when basic social categories and cultural meanings are shifting. I argue that this migration is a continuation of long-standing American traditions of starting over rooted in a belief that we can remake ourselves through sheer force of will. At the same time, it is also a uniquely modern expression as people respond to challenges and opportunities of a flexible economy based increasingly on contingent work. I endeavor to present the material in a manner which documents everyday life such that readers can relate to the stories and reflect on their own lives.

 
"Community Building Among Indonesian Transmigrants: The Challenges of Social and Ecological Sustainability."

Jan - Dec 1998 ... Kebupatan Bolaang Mongondow, Province of Northern Sulawesi, Republic of Indonesia.

Summary: This project examines a government resettlement program in order to explore different ways of looking at the idea of community and community building. Transmigration settlements are both planned and intentional communities. They are planned in accordance to government priorities, which intend them to serve in the building of an imagined community – a unified nation. They are also places where settlers struggle, following their own intent, to build their own personal, everyday vision of community as a place where they feel that they belong.

For a concise summary of my fieldwork experiences, research interests, and future plans, please have a look a Statement of Research Interests (or in Adobe PDF Format).
 

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