‘To Fill in the Missing Piece of the Middletown Puzzle’: Lessons from Re-Studying Middletown

Abstract

This paper revisits The Other Side of Middletown, a collaborative ethnography written by a group of faculty, students and African Americans living in Muncie, Indiana – the town made famous by Robert and Helen Lynd in their 1929 original study, Middletown, and its 1937 follow-up, Middletown in Transition. Our re-study (published in 2004) addressed the lack of African American history and experience in the Lynds' works and in the Middletown literature that has materialized since then. Employing a collaborative approach to research and writing, the lines between researchers and research participants were considerably blurred: community members, students and faculty collaborated on research design, cooperatively lined out the study's overall questions, and together wrote and edited the final manuscript. Thus, working at the nexus between community and university, the study prompted multiple opportunities to complicate research methods, expand public scholarship and, importantly, augment teaching and learning between and among faculty, students and local communities. Reflections written by project participants in the book itself and in various published venues since its completion, for example, share an emphasis on how the partnership changed views of and experiences with race relations, community and university. With this in mind, I describe the particular social and relational contexts in which The Other Side of Middletown project first developed; elaborate its connections to the Lynds' original Middletown studies; summarize our study's approach and findings; and offer a few of the more salient lessons that materialized from our work: especially those that attend to issues of collaborative research, community engagement and shared pedagogies.