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In "Making Ends Meet: Knowledge, Ingenuity, and the Hardships of Poverty," the author presents a proposal for a narrative-based ethnographic dissertation purposed to discover the role of ingenuity and knowledge within the tragic stories of people barely making ends meet. Within these tragic stories, everyday working-class heroes and heroines are confronted with the ever-present hardships of poverty and the constant necessity to innovate new ways of coping, making the buck go further, and otherwise reduce the costs of living in Northern Virginia.
The tragedy within these stories are these reoccurring costs of living which come due at least once every month, with bills due, and at most daily, as these heroes and heroines search for their next meals. The tragic heroes and heroines of these stories are, for the most part, restaurant workers at two corporate owned establishments in Manassas and Gainesville, VA; the other heroes and heroines are the friends and roommates of these restaurant workers. The author will be utilizing the methods of participant-observation and story-telling to elicit these tragic stories and discover the role of ingenuity and knowledge in enabling these tragic heroes and heroines to cling on to the brink of barely making ends meet.