Middletown Studies Research

 Immersive and Experiential Learning Projects

The Center For Middletown Studies provides opportunities for students to participate in immersive and experiential learning projects at Ball State.  These initiatives usually combine academic work with hands-on, collaborative community engagement to produce something of value for community-based partners.  Examples of projects supported by the Center include the following:

The Evolution of Getting a Living in Middletown

Ball State students enrolled in Fall, 2022 section of History 414 (Seminar in Middletown Studies) produced “The Evolution of Getting a Living in Middletown,” a digital project that uses evidence about Muncie developed through Middletown research to explore the history of work experiences in modern America.  The project uses Scalar, an open-source digital publishing platform provided through Ball State University Libraries. It enabled students to create a more complex, multilinear interpretation that includes interactive elements and employs a variety of media, including video, audio, and photographs along with text.

The Other Side of Middletown

This collaborative ethnography, undertaken in 2003-04 and spearheaded by Hurley Goodall, Eric Lassister (Anthropology), Elizabeth Campbell, and Michelle Natasya Johnson, resulted in the publication of The Other Side of Middletown: Exploring Muncie’s African American Community (2004).  This award-winning book explored the history and character of Muncie’s Black community, which had been largely neglected in other Middletown scholarship.  It also serves as a model for collaborative ethnography, an approach in which authority is shared between scholars and community members.  The work took place under the auspices of the Virginia B. Ball Center for Creative Inquiry at Ball State, with support from the Center.

Adolescent Well-Being in Muncie 

The Adolescent Well-Being in Muncie project was a collaborative partnership between the Center for Middletown Studies and the Department of Sociology to establish an interdisciplinary immersive learning course. It provided students with an opportunity to collect data, analyze it, and investigate links between economic change and adolescent well-being. Working under the direction of Carolyn Kapinus, Associate Professor of Sociology, and with the support of the Center during the 2009-2010 academic year, students compiled reports for community organizations such as the YMCA, Delaware County Court Appointed Special Advocates, and the Youth Opportunity Center. The project was supported by a Discovery Grant.  

Changing Gears

From 2009-2011, Ball State’s Institute for Digital Education and Entertainment and the Center for Middletown Studies jointly produced Changing Gears, a feature-length documentary film about the 2009 closing of Muncie’s century-old Warner Gear auto parts plant and the meaning of the loss for workers and for the community.  Students participated in the development of the film’s concept, research, interviewing, the creation of a treatment, and editing.  The project was funded in part with a grant from Ball State’s Office of the Provost.

What Middletown Read

What Middletown Read is a collaborative project of The Center for Middletown Studies, Ball State University Libraries and the Muncie Public Library. Frank Felsenstein, now Reed D. Voran Professor of the Humanities Emeritus at Ball State, uncovered a unique cache of surviving library records that document the books each borrower took from the local public library in Muncie. The project team converted this extraordinarily rich body of materials, supplemented by demographic data drawn from city directories and census records as well as bibliographic information, into a searchable, online database that contains details on more than 6,000 library patrons, 11,000 books, and 175,000 circulation transactions for the period from 1891-1902 (with one gap). More than twenty students, ranging from freshman to doctoral candidates, contributed to the effort.  Construction of the database was made possible by financial support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, and Ball State University. This rich resource, made publicly available in 2011, has received wide use by students, scholars, and members of the public since it launched.  In 2015, Felsenstein and Center Director James Connolly published What Middletown Read: Print Culture in an American Small City (Massachusetts).  Later that year, the NEH highlighted What Middletown Read as one of 50 exemplary projects funded during its first 50 years of existence.

Everyday Life in Middletown (EDLM)

Everyday Life in Middletown is a collaboration between the Center for Middletown Studies and citizens of Muncie, Indiana, to record, represent, and discuss everyday life in our city. This ongoing effort began as a student-driven immersive learning project headed by Patrick Collier (English) sponsored by the Virginia B. Ball Center for Creative Inquiry and now operating under the auspices of the Center.  EDLM documents the everyday in two ways: through day diaries, kept by volunteer writers who record their daily lives in detail and submit them to our archive, and through our blog, where we post commentary and discussion on everyday life in our community, including analysis of the diaries. In addition to VBC support, the project has received funding from BSU’s Digital Scholarship Lab.

Muslims in Muncie

The Center for Middletown Studies served as a partner on the Muslims in Muncie Oral History and Documentary Project.   A Virginia B. Ball Center for Creative Inquiry project headed by Elizabeth Agnew (Philosophy and Religious Studies) and undertaken in collaboration with the Islamic Center of Muncie, Muslims in Muncie produced an hour-long documentary and archived twenty-two oral history interviews that examine the experiences of local Muslim residents from the 1960s to the 2010s.  The project was the recipient of the 2019 Award for Oral History in a Non-Print Format from the Oral History Association and the Alice Smith Prize in Public History from the Midwestern History Association.

Workers and Industry in Muncie, Indiana, 1880-2012

Graduate Students Brendan White (History/Center for Middletown Studies) and Ike Obi (Digital Scholarship Lab) constructed a timeline of labor history in Muncie, Indiana, covering the period from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century.  It documents the experiences of workers in the context of the rise and fall of labor-intensive manufacturing in this emblematic American city.  You can view the timeline here.

The Riverside/Normal City Neighborhood Project

In Fall 2016, students in Prof. Jen Erickson’s Ethnographic Methods class in the Department of Anthropology at Ball State University conducted archival research, participant observation, and interviews in order to understand how this neighborhood changed over time. With support from the Center for Middletown Studies and the BSU Provost’s Office, the participating students created an online resource for the neighborhood. The video above briefly explains this project.