 |
- Site Index |
MEET THE RESEARCHER |
WHO'S WHO IN MPRC |
ACTIVITIES |
AFFILIATIONS |
Meet Our Researchers |
||||||||
| ||||||||
Recent Scientific Accomplishments During the past 3 years, Falk’s research has focused primarily on one thing -- the power of place ?in primarily one place ?the American South. He asks questions about the ways in which people get “rooted in place?(the title of his most recent book); how their identities are psychologically and sociologically grounded in the places where they live. He has been exploring the power of place in two inter-related projects: (1) A social history and ethnography of one historically black, low-income community in the Low country (the marshy coastal area of Georgia and South Carolina). Here he has asked about black people who never left the region when so many others did. To his surprise, place played a powerful role in this. This work led to the book Rooted in Place (Rutgers University Press, 2004). (2) quantitative analyses of U.S. migration processes, focusing especially on the migration experiences for whites and blacks in and out of the South. Here, Falk and his colleagues have raised a provocative argument about the South possibly being a new “promised land?for African Americans, with far more moving into than (as was historically true) out of the South in recent decades. Falk and his colleagues have published one article directly on this (in Rural Sociology 2004) with a related article focusing on Hurricane Katrina and African Americans in New Orleans (Du Bois Review 2006). With colleagues Larry L. Hunt and Matthew O. Hunt, Falk submitted an R03 research proposal to the National Institutes of Health. The priority score was sufficiently high that they were encouraged to revise and resubmit the proposal. A topic related to the work on this proposal will be the focus for another research project, to be submitted for funding to the National Science Foundation. Falk, with colleagues Larry Hunt and Matthew Hunt, is presently revising two manuscripts on black and white southern migration. These papers offer the most complex multivariate analysis to date on black and white migration to the South. A new project (begun in 2006) focuses on the rise and role of gated communities in the American South. Falk has identified these communities as crucial for any understanding of the “New South?(a term meant to convey the socially progressive, less racially driven region). Falk is asking how these new gated communities came into existence in areas (Lowcountry counties) that were almost entirely rural, hence mostly safe, secure places. So why the need for gated communities and especially, and importantly, ones called “plantation.?Falk is again using a social historical ethnographic approach to this project, and will be speaking with not only the developers of gated communities but also the residents and the local indigenous population, black and white. He is investigating these communities for two reasons. First, their rapid growth may be a primary driver of middle class (re)migration from north to south. Secondly, these communities which exist within short distances of poorer white and black communities give him the opportunity to study both relationships between communities across class but within race and relationships between communities within class but across race. This will lead to an understanding of the relative importance of race-based and class-based impediments to social integration of migrants. | ||||||||
Maryland Population Research Center
0124N Cole Student Activities Building (#162)
College Park, MD 20742
Phone: 301-405-6403
Fax: 301-405-5743