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FUTURE LONG-TERM PROJECTS

Organizing Fellows: Bosiljka Glumac (Geology), Richard Lim (History)

Time matters, and in ways that we are not always fully conscious of. We aim to rectify this by proposing a long-term Kahn project that will be a cross-disciplinary exploration of the definition, determination, meaning, and significance of time. We are interested in the ways that temporal and temporality shape materials, events, and processes, as well as how we perceive, analyze and create discourses using them. The general aim of the project, therefore, will be to understand both the effects of time on things and the implications of the temporal dimension for our ways of seeing and interpreting the world and our place in it. The project will consider a broad range of questions. Some will treat the metrics of time, including: how do we tell the age of ancient objects and materials? How do we determine the temporal sequence of past processes and the rates at which changes occurred? Other questions may concern the temporal lens as a way of seeing. What roles do the measurement of time play in shaping our respective intellectual disciplines? Why do temporal contexts and relationships matter in our interpretations and analyses and how do they shape our appreciation of the past, present, and future? Can knowledge of the historical dimension ever have a distorting effect on our analyses?

The practice of archeology may provide us with an apt metaphor for our proposed project, for while we are in interested the discovery and measurement of past time, we are also interested in the archaeology of knowledge itself. While the temporal dimension is surely present in all facets of human life and in the intellectual endeavors of every academic discipline, it is never analytically neutral. For example, traditionally time is determined by observing the movement of the Earth, the Moon, the Sun and other stars, while modern approaches use atomic clocks and quasar observations. But do they tell the very same “story” of time? Astronomers and geologists use the concept of “deep time” to express time in millions and billions of years. Timing of historical events, on the other hand, is stated in millennia, centuries, decades and years. Biologists study organisms with life cycles of 24 hours or shorter, an athlete can win a race by a hundredth of a second, and time can be measured in billionths of a second. How is our perception of time influenced by such an enormous range of temporal scales?

Historians who work on cultural memory and how societies remember (and invent) the past, have introduced doubt into the conventional understanding of human history as a neutral, continuous unfolding of events and processes from the past to the present. What about the storytellers? To what extent (and to what intellectual end) has the “historical record” of a certain event been a story told by those with a direct stake in how it has been represented? How do those who tell the story of time, whether archeologists, paleontologists, or cultural historians, been predisposed by their training to only look for things in certain ways, but not others, and what are the implications of these methodological blind spots? A premise of this project is that our own intellectual practices would be enriched and deepened by a greater awareness of how telling and invoking time shape our own work, as well as an appreciation of the variety of temporal understandings and practices across other disciplines.

This project will be “about time” and is open to scholars whose work navigates its course and who wish to consider its promises, problems, and prospects.

Organizing Fellows: Mary Harrington (Psychology) & Benita Jackson (Psychology)

This project will consider the presence of illness and disease in our history, our culture, our social arrangements, and in our mental constructions. In other words, disease will be viewed not only in epidemiological terms, but in the ways that it insinuates itself in our psyche, our cultural imagination, and our institutions; as well as how we have come to habituate ourselves to it.

For example, the hold that cancer has on our cultural imagination may be as powerful as the one that it exerts on the bodies of cancer patients. While cancer looms over all of us as an incurable disease in potentia, it also exists as a powerful symbolic metaphor. Cancer can seem to lurk everywhere in our physical environment, making a risk out of the foods that we eat, the places that we work, and technological forms and processes that we have come to depend upon. Cancer sometimes seems ubiquitous, but serious diseases of all kinds punctuate the background and foreground of our everyday lives, and are treated as much by our prejudices and our moral judgments as by our medical procedures. Thus, sexually transmitted diseases impose themselves on our most intimate relations and often invite harsh moral stigma; and diseases that are born by conditions of economic poverty magnify unfairness because health and medical treatment are among the deprivations experienced by the poor.

To a certain degree, illness exists in close association with its obverse and so it cannot be fully understood apart from the ways that wellness is experienced and represented, as a state of mind, as a condition of the body, as a discursive narrative, and as a practice. In this project we will treat states of disease and states of wellness not only as physiological and epidemiological realities, but as complex historical, psychological, and socio-cultural processes. The specific questions that will be asked about illness and wellness will of course be determined by the specific kinds of research being done and the intellectual inclinations of the Fellows of the project. Some may be of an epistemological nature. For example, how might our understanding of the biology of disease, including cancer, affect the experience of being ill? We will also want to ask questions about how diseases sort themselves out in a population, in social and demographic terms, and what factors play a role in determining this. We might ask about the ways health care delivery differs across different social groups, both in U.S. society and across borders. Some may be interested in how the media influence our ideas about disease as well as the factors that influence how the media treats disease. We will want to know how our sense of well being is shaped by the experience of being ill, such as whether surviving cancer might alter psychological identity, or the influences that shape the degree of hope and optimism or isolation and loneliness that a cancer patient might feel.

While the work of some project Fellows may be directly and explicitly related to a particular disease, others may bring research interests that focus on treatment, through traditional or alternative medical practices, practitioners, or institutions. Still others may be interested in conditions that produce health and well-being, such as improvements in environmental pollution or the process and problems of health education in more and less-developed societies, or the efficacy of movements that raise awareness of disease. Whatever questions our own intellectual backgrounds may predispose us to ask, what this project promises is an extended cross-disciplinary dialogue that will help us all think more broadly and in new ways about wellness and illness.

Organizing Fellow: Rick Fantasia (Sociology)

One problem with ethnographic research is that it typically offers only a single vantage point from which a people or a group or a community will be viewed. And not only is the perspective of the ethnographer necessarily partial, it may also be partisan, to the extent that it is conditioned by any number of cultural or ideological factors whose effects are not always possible to predict, or control for, or to even be fully aware of. A related problem is that as the product of a distinctive intellectual milieu (a single discipline, a particular theoretical “school” within that discipline, or as the product of a particular moment of intellectual history of the discipline) the analysis that is produced will tend to more or less reflect it.

Another problem with ethnographic research is that it is a notoriously time-consuming, labor intensive, and isolating experience, one that few scholars are able to sustain over the course of an entire career. It is for this reason that most of the classic ethnographic community studies by sociologists and social anthropologists were written as their doctoral theses while they were graduate students. Few scholars, once they are settled into a life, and a career, and a family, are ever able to uproot themselves again for an extended period of ethnographic immersion that community ethnographies generally require.

With a proposal for a Kahn Institute project, tentatively entitled “Local Ethnography,” the aim is to overcome these traditional limitations of ethnographic research by fashioning a new kind of collaborative research model. The project aims to assemble social researchers from several disciplines, with varying substantive interests and perspectives, as well as from different age cohorts, in order to participate in what will be constructed as a year-long research workshop. In the workshop we will share our ways of seeing and our ways of working, in an effort to synchronize analytical perspectives in the development and writing of a grant proposal to support a large-scale, multi-year community study within the local Pioneer Valley. This Kahn project will thus not actually be a research project per se, but rather will serve as the incubator for planning a research project. It will be a vehicle for Fellows to hammer out differences over theoretical questions and methodological strategies, to share techniques, and eventually to synchronize our efforts sufficiently to produce a grant proposal by the end of the project. The grant will then be used to support a longer-term ethnographic study that will be conducted by the Kahn Fellows of the Project.

The Project will be centered around a weekly research seminar that will bring in practitioners of community ethnography and representatives from other collective research projects, as well as grants officers (from the National Science Foundation, Social Science Research Council, Ford Foundations). Most importantly, however, the seminar will serve as the mechanism for working our separate interests together into a confluence of practical research questions. To accomplish this, all the Fellows will regularly submit their ideas to the group for critical reflection and scrutiny and dialogue, and out of this process will be built a common platform of methodological strategies to be presented as the basis for a grant proposal and to be deployed in the research itself.

Several years ago I organized a series of group discussions with scholars who had been, or had been contemplating doing various kinds of social research in this local area, in order to gauge the feasibility of eventually developing a long-term collaborative research project. The preliminary group consisted of some twenty-two scholars representing six different fields (sociology, geography, history, social work, labor studies, and a library archivist) who met four times (in various combinations, over long lunches in the Kahn Institute seminar room) between the fall of 2000 and the spring of 2002 for an extremely fruitful extended discussion that convinced me of the great potential for such a project. What was immediately clear to everyone was the absurdity of working as relatively isolated scholars on individual research projects, when everyone would benefit from collaboration and when one could learn so much more about the community by drawing up the work of others. Moreover, to study the social world in such narrow slices is analytically distorting because the social world is itself produced relationally. For example, in important respects, Northampton is what it is because it is not Holyoke or Greenfield, and vice versa. And what make an evangelical Puerto Rican church in Holyoke sociologically interesting may not only be what occurs within it, but how it is conditioned by its relationship to mainstream denominations and churches, and by its relationship to other social institutions (city government, labor markets, immigration inflows and outflows, etc.) both in Holyoke and beyond. And we can understand more fully the situation of troubled teenagers in a town if we also know about the conditions of local schools, the changing situation of teachers and the pressures on them, the nature of the local economy, etc. The point is that no single researcher can capture as broad a picture as a team of researchers working together, who can agree on the common and critical nodes of social life that ought to be studied (and the manner of studying them) and can then be engaged in an ongoing dialogue with their colleagues who will be studying them.

I envision various roles for Student Fellows. One possibility could be to draw in students who've had some sort of internship or practical experience within the geographic area (in a social service agency, for example) who could then use our project to conceptualize ways in which a study could be developed out of that experience, and then to go ahead and design it. And in fact, perhaps one or two of the students who might plan to be in the area beyond graduation could have their piece written into the larger grant, either for them to do, or for one of the researchers we hire to do it.

The end result of such a research project will be an archive of systematically-collected social data that can be drawn upon not only by each of the Fellows, to write their/our articles and books, both individually and collectively authored, but for future researchers to drawn on and add to. The archives of the Sophia Smith Collection might make an appropriate home for such a collection, but one could imagine a public library as well. The point is that this project should become a “gift that keeps on giving” for many years to come.