Research

Sponsored Research - Affiliated Faculty

• Regimes of Knowledge: Intellectual and Cultural Rights
• Cultural Pluralism In The Chicago Art World
• Informal Politics in the Global City: The New Circus Culture in Chicago
• Culture and Mental Illness in Uptown

Regimes of Knowledge: Intellectual and Cultural Rights

Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, College Anthropology and Social Sciences Programs.

This study addresses concepts of property in general and concepts of cultural possessions in particular that have been combined with regimes of knowledge to produce very diverse views about intellectual and cultural rights. These issues have been under-elaborated to this day, with very little dialogue going on between the three most relevant disciplines, namely anthropology, history and law. As a result, each holds a rather simplistic view of the others' contributions. By bringing together views from these different disciplines, I hope to establish a dialogue that has academic as well as policy implications. One of the implications I have in mind is the issue of traditional peoples' cultural and intellectual rights, currently being discussed in several UN bodies (WIPO, UNCTAD, UNESCO, FAO, etc.) as well as in multilateral banks and the WTO (World Trade Organization).

Establishing an international regime for those cultural rights hinges on looking for an interface between a roughly 300 year-old Western regime of intellectual property rights and a multitude of other specific regimes around the world. This is no easy task, and the UN and other bodies mentioned above, as well as several NGOs, have been struggling with it.

Cultural Pluralism In The Chicago Art World

Betty Farrell, College Public Policy Studies Program.

This project investigates questions of access, diversity, inclusivity, and cultural pluralism in the Chicago art world. My project has investigated the forces of change in the city's most well-established cultural institutions, as well as the sources of resistance to this kind of change. I have been particularly interested in the city's cultural mix of "high art" institutions and community-based arts and cultural projects of all kinds, and the types of community engagement (or outreach) programs that link them. My research to date has included some of the following questions:

• Which cultural organizations in Chicago have been the most successful in creating greater public access and expanding their audience base? Which least successful—and why might this be so?
• To what extent is the Chicago art world open/accessible to new artists—especially a younger and more racially/ethnically diverse group? Are there particular art forms that are more open and accessible to both artists and audiences than others (for example, dance and theater as compared to the visual arts), and, if so, what accounts for the differences in an artistic field or genre?
• What has been the impact of expanded sources of cultural patronage (e.g., from the city's Department of Cultural Affairs and local and national foundations) on access and diversity?

For this project, I have done extensive interviewing, observations, and archival research over the past two years. A Graduate Research Assistant will help expand the project in terms of breadth with a more comparative focus. A graduate student research assistant for this project would have the responsibility for collecting information and data on arts/culture diversity initiatives in other cities in the U.S. and abroad, particularly those associated with established cultural organizations, such as art museums, symphony orchestras, opera companies, and theaters. An inventory of successful programs from other cities, combined with data about patterns of patronage, audience participation, and cultural policies at the city, state, and national levels that support innovative arts programs would add an important complement to my study of the Chicago art world, providing it with a broader comparative context for a more theoretical analysis. The graduate student should possess strong research skills, involving familiarity with library and web-based searches and the capacity to conduct open-ended telephone interviews, for this primarily qualitative research project.

Informal Politics in the Global City: The New Circus Culture in Chicago

Saskia Sassen, Sociology.

As the world of formal politics has decayed and lost much vibrancy for ordinary people, we have seen a proliferation of theatrical political forms. The demonstrations against the IMF or the WTO increasingly contain theatrical components. The revitalizing of the May Labor Day parade in Chicago, and the world wide marches against the bombing in Iraq on February 15 2003 are yet other examples of this new type of political vocabulary.

Most recently, Chicago has seen the growth of an informal (non-corporate) circus culture, whose participants are political. This is a circus culture that involves theatre, performance art, and multimedia events. Circus is the operative category for these artists. This is a whole new world of politics and culture. I would like to research it and understand how it fits in the broader setting of the non-corporate creative arts in Chicago and in this new type of informal politics I see exploding around the world, especially in major cities

I propose to study emergent spaces for politics and for cultural practices using the circus culture as the particular case study. The particular concern here is with types of practices that do not run through formal systems. Street-level politics and cultural practices have increasingly become woven together. US cities have a long history of street level politics.

The contents, the purposes, the mobilizers and the enactors of these politics have changed over time. Today's global cities—such as Chicago—are a very specific type of place because they bring together both the most globalized sectors of capital with its new transnational professionals, on the one hand, and a growing number of immigrants and native minoritized or contestatory groups in a single, complex space. It is this feature I want to use as the larger context within which to examine the type of cultural-political practice that is this emergent type of circus.

In looking at a cultural underground in Chicago we are also dealing with the fact that global cities today function both as a partly de-nationalized platform for global capital and, at the same time, as a key site for the most astounding mix of people from all over the world. Further, the growing intensity of transactions among these cities world wide is creating strategic cross-border geographies—for capital, for professionals, for immigrants, for traders, and I hypothesize for cultural practices—which partly bypass the nation-state. This holds even for a state as powerful as that of the U.S. The new network technologies strengthen these transactions, whether they are electronic transfers of specialized services among firms or Internet-based communications among the members of globally dispersed diasporas and interest groups.

One of the issues we want to research is to what extent this new circus culture might have a trajectory similar to those of other cultural sectors that began as undergrounds and then entered corporate circuits, including the world music scene here in Chicago. The policy implications are also to be researched.

We already have considerable information about Chicago as a global city. There are also materials, including some from doctoral dissertations, about several cultural undergrounds in Chicago that eventually became part of corporate sectors. That means that we want to focus above all else on a) gathering data about the circus culture in Chicago; b) gathering data on possible new circus cultures in other cities; c) understanding the political economy of these circus cultures—what they are about, how they function culturally, how they manage financially; and d) what is the nature of their insertion in the local community and in the larger space of the city.

Overall the purpose is to locate the new circus culture in a broader politico-economic landscape and to understand the multiplier effects and cultural policy potentials of this development. We would hope to produce a strong set of articles, including some for general circulation and some for the research literature. The project has positions for up to two graduate student researchers.

Culture and Mental Illness in Uptown

Tanya Luhrmann, Committee on Human Development

The plan of my research, is to conduct client-focused ethnography on women and on how they come to understand mental illness as they navigate through the complex array of available services. Sarah's Circle provides a useful base for the project because Sarah's clients have a wide range of contact with the mental health services system, but the research will also incorporate the range of other settings where one finds such women (street outreach, the overnight shelter, a day drop-in center, transitional housing, and single room occupancy housing).

The primary method of this research is ethnography, which is the study through participant observation of a group of people as they carry out their daily lives. The skills of ethnographic observation bear some resemblance to the skills of clinical observation and to some extent are taught in a similar manner, through apprenticeship and supervision. Ethnographic research involves two distinct activities. First, the ethnographer enters the social setting and participates in daily activities, developing relationships with members of the group while observing what is going on. The intent is to immerse oneself in another world in order to grasp what members of that world experience as meaningful and important. Second, the ethnographer writes down in systematic, regular ways what she or he observes in the process of observation. The ethnographer's job is describe what tasks a member of society must master in order to be a minimally competent member of the group, what kinds of relationships a member of the group must maintain and how she learns to maintain them, and what categories (words, phrases, narratives) a member of that group uses to interpret her experience. These patterns are extracted from ethnographic fieldnotes, written immediately after the period of observation, roughly at the rate of one hour of writing for each hour of observation. At intervals throughout data collection and again at the end, the ethnographer reads through the fieldnotes and interview transcripts and codes them for patterns identified in preliminary research and for patterns that emerge during later research.

The goal for the Graduate Student Researchers is to extend this research into other cultural domains by having them carry out ethnographic work on the way some other community, ideally in Uptown, identifies, experiences and chooses to handle mental illness. Again, this is a neighborhood rife with refugee and immigrant communities, and there are many services in the area available to treat them Often, these services are woefully underutilized. For example, Asian Human Services sits one block west from Sarah's, and offers language-accessible treatment for mental illness for a wide variety of Asian communities. The Center had (on last inquiry) 500 Cambodian patients and 19—nineteen—South Asian clients, figures which do not reflect the number of immigrants in the general area (Asian Human Services has a branch in Rogers Park) nor the relative level of illness. It would be fairly easy to establish a connection to an agency which suited the interests of the student.

There are positions for up to two graduate students. Each would have the same expectations. They would carry out independent work each week on a local ethnic community of their choice (although I have some suggestions: I would love, because of the apparent differences in psychotic symptoms, to have studies of the Senegalese community and a South Asian community near Uptown). Some time will involve participant observation with a chosen community in a mental health service setting, in a family setting, or in some other appropriate setting (the local McDonalds, for instance, used to be a setting where one could find clients). Additional time would involve ethnographic note writing. In addition, they would attend the two hour meeting—equivalent to a ‘lab' meeting—in which those working on the main project (there would be three of us) will meet to talk about the fieldwork and to share data, insight and analysis. I regard that meeting as a training meeting, although I would also expect the student to have taken a course entitled Clinical Ethnography with me.

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