Gateway

This is the professional homepage of Brian A. Hoey. 

I received my Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Michigan in 2002.  In the fall of 2007, I became an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Marshall University.

My research encompasses a number of themes including personhood and place, migration, narrative identity and life-transition, community building, and negotiations between work, family, and self in different social, historical, and environmental contexts. Longstanding interests in career change, personal identity and the moral meanings of work lead to my project as a postdoctoral fellow from 2004-2007 at the Center for Ethnography of Everyday Life on “New Work,” unconventional arrangements of work, family and community life explored by so-called free-agents of a post-industrial economy.

My dissertation research in Northwest Lower Michigan explores non-economic or “life-style” migration where downsized and downshifting corporate workers relocate as a means of starting over. As a Fulbright Scholar in Indonesia, I studied the contested nature of constructing personally and culturally meaningful space within the process of creating imagined and intentional community in far-flung agrarian settlements within a government migration program. My most recent project considers how therapeutic ideals are attached to particular physical settings – including purposive communities that range from 19th century moral treatment asylums to today’s new urbanist developments.

This page is a gateway to more detailed information about my teaching and research.  You may follow links from the top or bottom of this page to begin your exploration or see an overview of the entire site by looking at the Site Map.  I hope you will find the information here helpful and interesting. Please do not hesitate to contact me if I may answer any questions or assist you in your own work. Thank you for your visit.  To quickly access a number of PDF documents such as my CV, teaching portfolio, and a statement of research interests, please visit the Documents Page.

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