Lifestyle Migration Research
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 and project specific materials. Click on ORANGE project titles for research specific pages. For a brief summary of my research experience and interests, you may like to see my profile on the "Who's Who in Work and Family" list prepared by the Alfred P. Sloan Work and Family Research Network.
Click here for a list of Selected Downloadable Publications. You can learn more about my work by following the Research and Press links, including the article "Some who've seen Paree are heading back to the farm" by John Ivanko in Michigan Today, Vol. 35(1) as noted in the Wikinfo site for "Lifestyle Migration."
Grand Traverse Region, Northwest Lower Peninsula of Michigan, United States of America.
UPDATE: I conducted follow-up research in the area during summer 2010 in anticipation of a book.
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.
For a concise summary of my fieldwork experiences, research interests, and future plans, please have a look a Statement of Research Interests.
Therapeutic Uses of Place in the Intentional Space of Purposive Community
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.
For a concise summary of my fieldwork experiences, research
interests, and future plans, please have a look a
Statement of Research
Interests.
