Graduate student Alison D. Goebel, supervised by Dr. Alejandro Lugo, will investigate how macroeconomic restructuring is reconfiguring middle class white culture in a small American city. Because race and class inform each other as cultural categories and in lived experiences, the researcher hypothesizes that deindustrialization, globalization, and economic reforms are destabilizing middle class status. This in turn may change dominant notions of racial identity and privilege. Other research has documented changing conceptions of race and class in global cities like New York and Los Angeles. This will be one of the first studies to investigate these important social issues in a smaller, regional urban area.
The research will be conducted in Mansfield, Ohio, a small deindustrializing city of 51,000 inhabitants. To document differences within white racial and middle class identities, the researcher will live in three different neighborhoods. She will collect data on the variety of experiences of whites and people of color through participant-observation, analyses of everyday talk, unstructured and semi-structured recorded interviews, and mapping exercises.
The research will contribute to social science theory on the societal effects of macro-economic restructuring and to a better understanding of the changing cognitive dimensions of racial identity in the United States today. The research also will support the education of a social scientist.
