This NSF Minority Post-Doctoral Fellowship research project in the Social and Behavioral Sciences attempts to delineate both gendered and indigenous understandings of mobility and the household among migrant women who reside in the Territory of Guam, but come from Chuuk, one island nation-state in the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM). Specifically, this study aims to discover how migrant women conceive of their built environment and how far ways of knowing, indigenous concepts and structures are reflected in spatial arrangements, built settlements, and household dwellings framed within a process commonly known as urbanization and modernity. Several of Guam's key geographical, social, and demographic characteristics make it ideal to realize such research aims. Guam, a territory of the United States, lies geographically in Micronesia and has a population of just under 155,000 (US Bureau of the Census 2000). The FSM citizens on Guam make up slightly over seven percent of this number and constitute the fastest growing migrant community (Rubinstein and Levin 1992). They are in the process of creating enclave communities where social interaction, as well as the visible emergence of new, resisted, or transformed domestic arrangements and forms of sociability encourages ethnographic study. The FSM is comprised of four states: Yap, Chuuk, Pohnpei and Kosrae. The post-doctoral fellow has chosen to focus on women from one state, Chuuk, because its nationals make up the largest proportion (72 percent: US Bureau of the Census 2000) of FSM migrants on Guam. The project reflects theoretical concerns with gendered and indigenous notions of "space". A goal is to deepen theoretical understanding where epistemology and methodology meet through field strategies that evince a holistic, in-depth treatment of an enclave community, from the inside out and from the bottom up, as distinct from statistical extrapolation of numbers and attributes of community migrants (Chapman 1987; Mitchell 1983). Building on past experience, observation, interviewing, and recording will proceed with specific reference to 1) indigenous concepts and structures of spatial mobility, 2) the manner is which migrant women both create and find their behavior influenced by their dwellings, and 3) broader processes of cultural activity and identity among migrant women in the urban setting. The proposed project extends doctoral research on the atoll of Satowan (Chuuk). In attempting to write about social or cognitive space as a framework for a more comprehensive understanding of mobility, the researcher argues that reducing people to the label 'migrant,' or to the idea they are simply and characteristically 'rural' or 'urban,' speaks little to how Satowan society define mobility. There are, for example, many attributes of mobility more closely associated with strong thought, high thought, no roots, self-centeredness, false wandering, and journeys without purpose that capture meanings of movement far more effectively than prevailing theories of attraction to the bright light,' urban drift, education explosion, or apparent boredom among young people. The broader impacts from the proposed activity are both specific and general. A major, practical outcome of this research will be to design and offer a workshop to run for the two consecutive summers during the length of the project oriented to professionals, students, and agencies in urban housing and land-use planning. This workshop will encourage improved understanding of women's roles in the urban environment, with specific reference to planning strategies for low-income households and community participation. Visits to migrant enclaves on the island will assess the applicability of the women and development literature to actual field situations. In-depth field instruments incorporated into and assessed throughout the proposed study could enhance treatment of ethnographic methods within each of my Family and Gender courses at the University of Guam. A more general outcome of project findings will be to foster effective policies for migrants in both the local Government of Guam and the federal US Department of the Interior. Information on housing, as a form of shelter, gives glimpses into the daily lives of migrants and how people come together to construct settlements and household dwellings. The allocation of money by the US Department of Interior and the social costs of immigration to the Government of Guam would be assisted by the stability and vulnerability of migrant households, residential patterns, migrant employment, female-headed households, and the economic roles played by women.
