Hoey received his Ph.D. in 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.

Hoey’s active research agenda is an integral part of teaching.  His goal is to work with students to find personally meaningful ways to apply anthropological knowledge and practice to real world problems.  You may learn more about his work at www.brianhoey.com.

Curriculum Vitae

 

Learn more about Dr. Hoey’s teaching and mentorship of students from recent graduates of the Anthropology Program