INTRODUCTION
VISION
The Center for Ethnographic and Oral History Research's (CEOHR) mission is to promote and support ethnographic and oral history research projects within the Appalachian Region. The Center will be a research cooperative competing for external grant opportunities focused on conducting high quality ethnographic and oral history research projects. Such research would be supported by various governmental and nongovernmental agencies. The Center will also make its services for hire to private and non-profit organizations wanting to conduct specialized research but who lack such capabilities in-house and are unable to find qualified, capable researchers regionally in the absence of a dedicated research center. In its work, the Center will further the academic and scholarly interests of Marshall University faculty. Moreover, the CEOHR will provide appropriate opportunities to graduate and undergraduate students. Such effort will support education and training in a variety of qualitative research methodologies.
RATIONALE FOR THE NEW CENTER
Public policy affects the cultural, social, and economic
wellbeing of the State of West Virginia and its citizens. Therefore, policy
makers and advocates for citizens require timely and complete information
regarding the consequences of current and proposed practices. The
collaborative initiative to create a center based at Marshall University that
promotes ethnographic and historical research brings together faculty and
students from such units as the Graduate Humanities Program, the
Department of Sociology and Anthropology, the Department of History, and the
Center for the Study of Gender and Ethnicity in Appalachia. Working
together, the research cooperative will collect, analyze, share, and preserve
information and knowledge concerning the State and Appalachian region.
Currently, many Marshall University departments receive requests for
ethnographic and historic research that extends beyond their individual
capacities to accept and carry out the required projects. During the
past two years, for example, the Graduate Humanities Program has received
multiple requests to conduct ethnographic and/or oral history research. The
Program has been invited to conduct research and disseminate historic and
ethnographic knowledge about a broad range of subjects, including coal mining,
the Civil War, slavery, farmers, and healthcare to name but a few. Such
requests for research often require extensive qualitative fieldwork including
interviews with individuals from particular populations now represented by
little more than numbers.
Ethnographic studies put a human face to statistics and provide insightful narratives of how, for example, public services are used by people in their everyday lives. Ethnographic and oral history methods provide a means of tapping and documenting local knowledge while identifying important categories of human experience. The quality of information generated by this inquiry can be of great use in informing public policy. Ethnographic approaches can help policy makers grasp emergent issues and see potential problems. For example, while statistical data may show growth in claims for certain public health benefits, it rarely throws light on why there is change.
While many requests are for more limited, short-term projects conducted over several months, there area also those that solicit major, multi-year proposals to collect documentary information about cultural understandings and historical patterns of work, family, and community life in Appalachia. At present, there is no centralized, university-based, interdisciplinary research facility in West Virginia with the staff, expertise, and resources to conduct and disseminate ethnographic and historical research. While there are multiple outlets for quantitative research in West Virginia — such as that provided by West Virginia University’s Survey Research Center — no university-based research center in West Virginia focuses explicitly on applied ethnographic and historic research. Consequently, State and Federal agencies wishing to conduct qualitative research in the region typically award contracts to for-profit and/or academic institutions located outside West Virginia. Although in the absence of the proposed Center, these external entities continue to meet a research need, there is a disconnect possible between their research and the policies that have a direct bearing on our communities and public interests.
A Center for Ethnographic and Oral History Research thus fills a critical need in the State and region. Once fully established, CEOHR will be responsible for fielding and carrying out ethnographic and oral history research and disseminating these findings to scholars, policy makers, and the public.
Download an informational flyer on the Center for Ethnographic and Oral History Research
CeOHR has its first director
Dr. Brian A. Hoey becomes the Center's first Director. Hoey is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Marshall University. He received his Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Michigan. His research encompasses a number of themes including personhood and place, migration, narrative identity and life-transition, community building, and negotiations between work, family, and self in different social, historical, and environmental contexts. Longstanding interests in career change, personal identity and the moral meanings of work lead to his project as a postdoctoral fellow at the Alfred P. Sloan Center for Ethnography of Everyday Life on “New Work,” unconventional arrangements of work, family and community life explored by so-called free-agents of the post-industrial economy. His dissertation research in Northwest Lower Michigan explored non-economic or “life-style” migration where downsized and downshifting corporate workers relocate as a means of starting over. As a Fulbright Scholar in Indonesia, he studied the contested nature of constructing personally and culturally meaningful space within the process of creating imagined and intentional community in far-flung agrarian settlements within a government migration program. Hoey’s most recent project considers how therapeutic ideals are attached to particular physical settings – including purposive communities that range from 19th century moral treatment asylums to today’s new urbanist developments.
JOURNAL LAUNCHED AT MARSHALL
Collaborative Anthropologies is a journal meant to engage the growing and ever-widening discussion of collaborative research and practice in anthropology and in closely related fields. Published annually, the journal:
- facilitates dialogue about collaborative anthropologies, including but not limited to those between and among researchers and their interlocutors, anthropologists and other scholars/practitioners, academics and other professionals, universities and local communities, faculty and students;
- embraces a special focus on the collaborative research between and among researchers and communities of informants/consultants/collaborators, but is by no means limited to this focus;
- promotes discussion about new forms of collaborative research that are engendering new kinds of collaborative anthropologies;
- charts new theoretical and methodological approaches, especially those that theorize collaboration and imagine new intellectual spaces for collaborative anthropologies;
- invites essays that are descriptive as well as analytical/interpretive/exploratory;
- solicits works from all subfields of anthropology (and closely related disciplines);
- encourages interdisciplinary inquiry into collaborative anthropologies, especially those that connect collaborative anthropologies with other modes of collaborative research practices;
- seeks a diversity of perspectives on collaborative research, including those academic, applied, and pedagogic;
- considers scholarship from single to multi-sited in scope and from all parts of the world; and
- includes book/media/exhibit reviews that chronicle the creative and innovative use of collaboration in anthropology and closely related fields.
Edited by Luke Eric Lassiter, Director of the Graduate Humanities Program at the Marshall University Graduate College in Charleston, WV. Dr. Lassiter is an Affiliate of CHEOR.
