Graduate student Jonathan DeVore, under the direction of Dr. Webb Keane, will undertake research on land reform policies and their effects on socioeconomic equality in contexts where there are multiple stakeholders. The research will be carried out through an ethnographic study of several new land reform communities in southern Bahia, Brazil, where landless poor, plantation owners, environmentalists, and tourism workers vie for primacy in planning for the social and physical landscape.
To understand what kind of worlds the different social groups hope for and strive to bring about requires attention to the range of ethical and aesthetic norms, ideals, values and future orientations that influence these different groups' activities, as well as to how the groups themselves are constituted and categorized. Therefore, the methodological orientation of this research is ethnographic, entailing long-term engagement and daily interactions with local people. The research design also incorporates semi-structured interviews, community surveys, and an adapted version of photovoice methodology.
The results of this research will contribute to debates among academics and policy makers who are concerned with defining agrarian reform policies that will be most equitable and effective. It will contribute to social theory about the relationship between national policy and local social structure. The research also supports the education of a social scientist.
