Marsha Brofka
I am a Ph.D. candidate in sociocultural anthropology, with a research focus on the nexus of environmental politics, industrial restructuring, and class. I conducted preliminary fieldwork in Oregon in 1996 with a National Science Foundation Graduate Student Predissertation Field Experience and Ethnographic Research Grant and returned there in 1998-1999 for my doctoral research with support from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. My dissertation examines how the common grammar of place and class can be read across three seemingly disparate events in southwestern Oregon: the so-called timber wars of the Pacific Northwest, the grounding of a freighter on Oregon's south coast, and debates about whether or not to invite Nucor Steel to build a steel mill in Coos Bay, Oregon. As some residents suggest cures for the local economic depression--renewing the declining timber industry, increasing tourism and shifting to a predominantly service economy, courting other industries to locate there--and others leave the community and seek opportunities elsewhere, ideas about place and understandings of class shape these conversations and decisions. I expect to defend my dissertation by May 2006.