We’ve had a busy fall term at the Center.  A few updates:

Support Student Research!  The Center, which has a long history of supporting hands-on student research experiences, is now raising funds to support those efforts.  Learn more here.

Deep Mapping Middletown.  We completed the project’s initial brainstorming workshop in September with support from the George and Frances Ball Foundation and Ball State’s Sponsored Project Administration.  In November, Jim Connolly and John Fillwalk presented Deep mapping Middletown: representing ethnographic data spatially at the 6th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Geospatial Humanities in Seattle, Washington.  We are now pursuing additional funding for the project. You can find more details on the project here.

Everyday Life in Middletown.  We completed another diary day on September 30th, 2022.  The contributions for that day can be accessed in the archive on the project website.  Project Directors Pat Collier and Jim Connolly presented at Futures in the History of Deindustrialization, Bologna, Italy, on October 13-15, 2022. Their paper titled “Middletown Revisited: Deindustrialization and Local Structures of Feeling in Muncie, Indiana” used the EDLM archive to explore the local response to deindustrialization in Muncie/Middletown. Collier and Connolly have completed an article, “Time shifts: Place, belonging, and future orientation in pandemic everyday life,” for History of the Human Sciences.  In it, we employ EDLM diaries to assess the impact of the pandemic on the experience of time. Check back for further details once it is published.

Reimagining Middletown: Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration in Muncie, Indiana.  The Center’s Assistant Director, Jen Erickson, submitted a research proposal, “Reimagining Middletown: Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration in Muncie, Indiana” to the Russell Sage foundation’s Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration funding stream.  The project examines Muncie’s engagement with refugees and other newcomers.

Middletown@Work.  Students enrolled in History 414, Seminar in Middletown Studies, are using the Middletown archive as the basis for a digital essay examining various facets of the history of work in the modern United States.  We will post a link when the project is published.