I am applying for a
fellowship to aid in the completion of an experimental digital
ethnography of Oak Park, a middle-class suburb of Chicago. Let
me describe the community, the purpose of the research and my
plans for its completion in an interactive, multimedia DVD format.
I conducted fieldwork from June, 2000 to May, 2001, gathering
digital video, audio interviews, photographs, and field notes.
I am currently in the process of analyzing these data. I plan
to return to the community several times to show preliminary versions
of the finished product to those portrayed so as to obtain their
feedback. A fellowship would enable me to cover the costs of
these trips and to devote more time to it than I could without
the fellowship.
It is a multifaceted investigation permitting me to pull together
a number of issues that have interested me for some time. Here
is a quick overview. At the broadest level, I am intrigued with
the application of ethnographic methods in the exploration of
an affluent middle-class suburban community. Social scientists
have too often concentrated on the exotic, the oppressed and the
pathological. There are few studies of a suburb that is, by its
own terms, successful. Oak Park is one of the more interesting
social experiments in the U.S. It is regarded internationally
as a model of successful ethnic integration. It is a community
convinced that it can self-consciously construct itself. How
it maintains its ideals and the impact of this experiment on the
everyday lives of its citizens is the focus of my study.
Oak Park is my place of birth and thus provides a chance to pursue
a long-term interest in reflexivity. I wish to understand what
happens when the anthropologist is both native and researcher.
I am studying some people I have known most of my life. I am
intrigued with the advantages and disadvantages. I am also taking
advantage of people's affluence and high level of education to
explore how the internet might serve as an ethnographic research
tool. I have established a web site (http://astro.temple.edu/~ruby/opp/)
where I offer regular updates via a listserv designed to encourage
residents' comments and criticisms. I get both on a frequent
basis.
Before I explain more, let me describe the setting for the ethnography.
Since its founding in the early 1900s, Oak Park was a bastion
of Republican white conservatism tempered slightly by a primarily
female progressive involvement in reform and social welfare. It
is known for its Frank Lloyd Wright houses and as the birthplace
of Ernest Hemingway, who left at nineteen claiming it was the
"middle-class capital of the world." In the late 1960s,
resegregation transformed white communities into black ghettos
decimating the west side of Chicago, including Austin, a neighborhood
that borders Oak Park. Everyone assumed that tide would continue
and engulf this suburb. It did not. In the forty years since,
Oak Park has evolved into a model integrated community where blacks
and whites strive to live together. Real estate values are soaring.
The vacancy rate in the apartments that constitute forty percent
of the housing units is less than one percent.
In order to realize their goals of integration and stability,
Oak Parkers marketed their community initially to African-Americans
to demonstrate that they really did intend to enforce their own
fair housing ordinance, and then, to middle-class liberal whites
to counterbalance the loss caused by the white flighters who fled
when blacks started to purchase houses. Probably because the
community gained a reputation for tolerance, a publicly active
gay and lesbian community also emerged. A poll by planetout.com
voted Oak Park one of the most gay friendly small towns in the
U.S. The community is amazingly ambitious in its attempt to be
diverse. Many of the residents who replaced those unable to accommodate
these changes are employed in social services, the medical professions
and are university professors. Oak Park has been transformed
into a haven for liberal whites - gay and straight - seeking
a place to act out their political and ethical values and for
middle-class blacks looking for a safe place with stable property
values and good schools.
I am exploring several aspects of this community in terms of how
some of its core values have remained the same while others have
been modified to accommodate planned diversity. One result of
this examination will be a series of related visual works (as
the finished product will be more than simply a film/videotape,
there is no word comprehensive enough to describe these ethnographies,
so I use the term "work"). Let me briefly discuss the
subjects of these works. In one, I am exploring how this community
devised a way to maintain the desired diversity. I concentrated
on the Oak Park Regional Housing Center, a non-profit organization
designed to prevent resegregation by affirmatively marketing apartments
in such a manner as to distribute whites and blacks throughout
the community and to avoid having any apartment building contain
a predominance of one ethnic group. The Housing Center is part
of a complex of village ordinances, other non-profit and governmental
agencies striving to keep the housing market healthy and integrated.
This is a plan that grew in a pragmatic fashion without any stated
ideological base. Its complexity is now beyond the knowledge
of any one person in the village. Some Oak Parkers have begun
to question the ethics of these activities. I hope to pull together
an overview of these activities in order to facilitate a critical
examination within the community and among scholars interested
in this subject.
One of the distinct advantages of working in a community of highly
educated subjects who share many of my cultural values is that
I can involve them in a high degree of collaboration. I started
by locating people whose lives allow me visually to explore certain
aspects of the community. In addition to my work on the Housing
Center, I am making three works about families in the hopes that
through their lives I can reveal some of Oak Park's core values
and how the transformation of the community impacts on the people
who live there. One family has been in the village for five generations.
In some respects they are the quintessential upper-middle-class
WASP Oak Park family. The matriarch is ninety-one and displays
all of the most traditional Oak Park values. And yet her son-in-law
is a bisexual retired public school teacher active in the local
politically powerful gay and lesbian organization and school district
politics. Her daughter-in-law is one of the first African Americans
to move to Oak Park. I left a mini-dv camera with the son-in-law
who will film for me over the next year and, in addition, produce
materials for a history of the gay and lesbian community. Another
family is composed of two lesbians and their children. One woman
is a native Oak Parker, community activist, and instrumental in
the formation of the local gay and lesbian organization. Their
engagement with the schools and other aspects of the community
illuminates a number of important issues concerning the integration
of gay people in Oak Park. The third family is a recently arrived
African American family whose lives allow me to explore the historical
and contemporary roles of African Americans in Oak Park as well
as the values of a middle-class black family. With these three,
I hope to show how some middle-class Oak Parkers cope with living
in the most interesting social experiment in the U.S.
I have employed very traditional methods of observation, participation
and have interviewed numerous people. I will write for scholarly
publications. But, in addition, I will produce some experimental
video ethnographies that exploit the potential of digital video
to shoot without benefit of a crew with a minimal budget independent
of the world of professional filmmaking. I will create a body
of work that is not designed for public television or the classroom
but rather as an expression of scholarly communication - a "video
book" with an introduction, several chapters, a conclusion
and appendices.
Let me explain how I am considering structuring of a "chapter"
of "The Oak Park Stories." I will use my work with
an African American family who moved to Oak Park two years ago,
as it is the most firmly conceived section. I plan to construct
a picture of their family life using interviews I filmed with
the husband and wife together with family snapshots they selected
and discussed on camera. I will also use scenes I shot at breakfast,
dinner, at the YMCA where the wife exercises (there is a nice
tie-in as someone who will figure prominently in another section
exercises with her), at a school board election rally attended
by the entire family, and a birthday party for their three-year-old
daughter. Edited together in a conventional manner it could tell
"the story" of this family. However such a film would
not be able to present their importance for an anthropological
understanding of Oak Park. Their lives need to be contextualized.
The history of African Americans in Oak Park needs to be explicated
if viewers are to understand how this particular family fits into
the unique social experiment of integration in Oak Park. In addition,
there is a further need to understand the family in the greater
historical and cultural context of middle-class African American
life in general and specifically in Chicago. The more common
solution would be for me to write a study guide to accompany the
film and hope that viewers will read it before viewing the film.
It should be obvious that such a hope is unrealistic. I want
viewers to understand the ethnographic relevance of this family
as a window into comprehending Oak Park as a place where the drama
of integration is being played out in a relatively unique fashion.
I cannot accomplish that in conventional ways.
I am trying to be mindful of the potential audience for this work.
I will strive to construct it assuming that some people will
only need brief introduction to the issues and ideas I raise while
others will wish to explore them in more depth. An interactive
DVD format affords me the luxury of authoring something that can
be used for a variety of purposes. For example, the history of
African Americans in Oak Park can be summarized in a few paragraphs
and a few photographs. When viewers access this section, they
will first see a brief comment with a note informing them that
additional information is available. If successful, the viewer
will be able to navigate through the work at a level useful for
their purposes and not one I completely determine.
The technology to produce interactive, multimedia DVDs for scholarly
purposes is only just being created. (I am currently exploring
the potential of Storyspace, software designed for multimedia
and interactive creations.) I have no models to use. I am making
this up as I go along, although a few anthropologists like Peter
Biella, Sarah Pink and Roderick Coover are preparing their own
digital ethnographies. I believe this approach to a pictorial
ethnography holds much promise. Only time will tell.