And we’re back.  We’ve wrapped up a busy spring and summer during which several of our projects moved forward. Everyday Life in Middletown held a diary day in May and solicited directive responses focused on two topics, work and social media, in July. Project directors Pat Collier and Jim Connolly also completed an essay entitled “Middletown Revisited: Deindustrialization and Local Structures of Feeling in Muncie, Indiana,” which is slated for publication in a still-to-be-named volume from the University of Bologna Press. Collier and Connolly also published “Time Shifts: Place, Belonging, and Future Orientation in Pandemic Everyday Life,” in the April, 2023 issue of the journal History of the Human Sciences (36:2).

Deep Mapping Middletown work continues as well along two tracks.  We commenced work on one module of the project, Mapping Middletown Voices, which will extract and represent spatial data from oral history collections. The MASTS (Mapping and Storytelling System) of Whitely project, led by Jorn Seemann (Geography) and supported with a Center fellowship and a grant from the Community Foundation of Muncie and Delaware County, is underway.  Seemann and students in his Geography 434 course will work with residents of the Whitely neighborhood during the Fall 2023 term to collect and share local history narratives through an online mapping platform.

The Center’s fellowship program also funded preliminary work on “Residential Decision-Making of College Students in an Era of Increasing Political Bifurcation and Devolution of Individual Rights,” an investigation of residential choices in the context of recent political development.  During the pilot phase of the project, Co-PIs Ellen Whitehead (Sociology) and Emily J. Wornell (CBER) will survey and interview Midwestern college students about the factors shaping their choice of where to live after graduation.

Jennifer Erickson, Assistant Director of the Center for Middletown Studies continues to lead a student team investigating Ball State University’s proposed “revitalization” of the Village. Their work will contribute to research on the role of universities in reviving economically weakened cities.

Erickson also collaborated with BSU faculty from several units to assess the needs of newly resettled Afghan refugees, as part of a larger effort to investigate the experiences and impact of refugees resettlement programs in postindustrial cities.

Be sure to check back later for further details on these and other projects.