Facing Middletown in the News

Muncie Star Press

June 3rd, 2025

Kickoff planned for June 6 on 'Facing Middletown' documentary, book

Full release below:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

The Facing Project and the Center for Middletown Studies launch documentary and book:

‘Facing Middletown’

Middletown, USA

100 Years

Muncie, Indiana in 2025

Contact: Aimee Robertson-West, The Facing Project

facingmiddletown@facingproject.com

In 2025, what does it mean to have a good life in America’s hometown, Muncie, Indiana?

Muncie, Indiana, also known by researchers across the United States as Middletown, USA, has served as a national bellwether for American hometowns and small city life. In the spirit of embracing this identity and responsibility that comes with recording accurate and unvarnished histories representing everyday life in small cities across the United States, The Facing Project, Center for Middletown Studies, and community partners invite the people of Muncie, Indiana and those who wish to learn from them, to participate in the 100-year mile marker documentary and book:

Facing Middletown

Middletown, USA -100 Years

Muncie, Indiana in 2025

‘FACING MIDDLETOWN’ TIMELINE

Facing Middletown’s community kickoff and documentary launch will be Friday, June 6th, 12:30pm, Madjax Muncie, at Muncie Land Bank’s “First Friday” located at 514 E. Jackson St. Muncie, Indiana, where public participation, discussion, documentary production, and enlistment and selection process of writers and storytellers for the ‘Facing Middletown’ publication will begin and remain open through September 1st, 2025.

At the June 6th launch event, Facing Middletown’s facilitators J.R. Jamison, Aimee Robertson-West (The Facing Project/Muncie/Delaware County Historical Society), Dr. Jennifer Erickson, Dr. James Connolly (Center for Middletown Studies) and community partners Dr. John West, (Urban Planning Department, Ball State), Nate Howard (Muncie Land Bank), Ken Hudson (Whitely Community Council), Jacquie Hannoman (Ross Community Center), J.P. Hall (Center for Historic Preservation), and Dr. Patrick Collier (Everyday Life in Middletown) will begin engaging Muncie’s residents and invite their inclusion in the compilation documentary and book which aims to find people in their places, show their lives across Muncie today, and archive that which will become history, tomorrow.

The Facing Project and Center for Middletown Studies will collaborate with an award-winning screenwriter and filmmaker, Rani Deighe Crowe, to produce a compilation documentary which will include Muncie residents’ personal home-video submissions and recorded interviews. Crowe says she “wants to hear Muncie speak and help facilitate the opportunity for the residents of Muncie to tell us and show us who they are and how they make a life."

The engagement event is free to the public and a light lunch will be served. Attendees are asked send an RSVP to facingmiddletown@facingproject.com with the number of people attending and come prepared to see video cameras, be willing to actively participate in facilitated discussions, and explore, aloud, the following questions and concepts:

When someone asks about life in Muncie, what do you tell them?
What is a good life in your place?
What allows you to live this life? What is standing in your way?
What are the questions that will help researchers understand you and your community?
What images would you use to represent life in Muncie?
What do you want to see this project produce?
What do you wish people knew about Muncie, but don’t?
What do you think, hope, or worry about happening to Muncie,

100 years from now?

PARTICIPATION

There are three big ways to participate in the ‘Facing Middletown’ book and documentary:

Go on the record.

Show up to our community callout sessions throughout Muncie, participate in documentary interviews, ask and answer important unanswered questions about life in Muncie in 2025. You don’t have to attend a community session to participate. Go on the record in an interview.

Become a writer or storyteller in the ‘Facing Middletown’ book.

Do you have something to say about living in Muncie and do not know how to say it?

Tell Muncie's story by understanding and sharing someone else's.

Become a storyteller or writer using the Facing Project's empathy-building model.

Become a Middletown Documenter

Uncover the stories hiding in plain sight: contribute your own video clips and photographs captured in 2025; ask questions and invite curiosity into your places and lives.

What is a Middletown Documenter?

‘Facing Middletown’ aims to make visible the daily lives and routines of people living across Muncie, Indiana. If you are interested in submitting photographs or footage captured in 2025 as a Middletown Documenter for the documentary, please review the Middletown Documenter specifications, at www.facingmiddletown.com

As the project takes shape, submitted images and footage will be featured on

Muncie People and Places gallery on social media.

KNOW BEFORE YOU GO

Attending the June 6th launch event at Madjax and participation in the “Facing Middletown” Documentary

For community members planning to attend the June 6th “Facing Middletown” launch event at Madjax, please be aware filmmaker Rani Deighe Crowe and her production crew will begin recording footage for the documentary at this event.

Upon entry, attendees will be asked to complete a release form.

Can’t make the June 6th launch event at Madjax and want to get involved?

The Facing Middletown facilitators and partners will hold three more community sessions across Muncie during the summer of 2025. The next session is Saturday, July 19th, from 2-4pm Ross Community Center, and other dates/locations are forthcoming.

It is important to note: the people and visitors of Muncie do not have to attend a community session to participate in Facing Middletown. Learn more about how to support and contribute at www.facingmiddletown.com and please contact Facing Middletown facilitators with ideas, questions, or feedback at facingmiddletown@facingproject.com

MUNCIE, INDIANA’S NATIONAL IDENTITY AS MIDDLETOWN, USA

Facing Middletown was born out of a shared desire to preserve multifaceted histories and honest storytelling in Muncie, Indiana. Because researchers and journalists have held up Muncie, Indiana as Middletown, USA, a representative American hometown, instead of approaching
as its own place, we are committed to providing a space to unearth and archive
some of the unique stories, trials, and tribulations of people living in Muncie, Indiana in 2025, whereby the people of Muncie have a say in their own story. Going into American cities and laying groundwork for communities to explore an understanding of themselves, Peter Kageyama, Urbanist and Author of ‘Love Where you Live’, ‘For the Love of Cities, Revisited’ and “Emotional Infrastructure of Places’ sees ‘Facing Middletown’ as way for Muncie to reflect upon its identity as a place for all American places to understand themselves. “To know others is knowledge. To know yourself is wisdom. Facing Middletown is a rare and wonderful opportunity for a community to look in the mirror, and not just the mirror today, but the mirror of history; to learn about itself and share that wisdom with others around the world.”

MIDDLETOWN STUDIES RESEARCH BACKGROUND

Dr. James Connolly, Center for Middletown Studies, Ball State University

A century ago, Robert and Helen Lynd arrived in Muncie to begin research for what would become Middletown: A Study in Modern American Life (1929). The book's success inaugurated a tradition of studying Muncie as Middletown that has continued down to the present. The anniversary of the first investigation offers an ideal opportunity for the community to explore its past, consider its present, and imagine its future, as "Facing Middletown" promises to do. The process of storytelling, reflection and sharing embedded in The Facing Project model provides a powerful way for residents to strengthen social and civic ties and deepen their attachment to our community.

"Facing Middletown" also offers a chance to address problems that marred the work of the Lynds and many of the researchers who followed them to Muncie. Middletown was enormously influential but also deeply flawed. It focused on some groups at the expense of others, particularly racial and religious minorities. Too often "Middletown" research has approached Muncie as "a city of 66,000 lab rats," to borrow a journalist's phrase, stripping away many of the city's distinctive qualities to define it as typical. Over the past half century, community groups have spearheaded efforts to overcome these limitations. "Facing Middletown" offers an opportunity to advance that work, developing a portrait of the community that captures its many dimensions and better reflects local understandings of Muncie's character.”

Dr. Jennifer Erickson, Center for Middletown Studies, Ball State University

“Middletown Studies offer an unprecedented longitudinal lens on how one community changes over time and how scholars and journalists have approached community studies in separate ways over time. The Lynds’ holistic, mixed methods approach to studying the city, and their attention to everyday life, made Middletown U.S.A. a seminal sociological study. Their omission of African Americans and immigrants teaches us important lessons about methodological blind spots, researcher bias, and neglect of minoritized populations. By excluding approximately five percent of Muncie’s population, the studies presented an incomplete picture of American community life and what it means to be American. Middletown Studies continue to matter today as they provide context for understanding contemporary social issues, from economic inequality to changing family structures, the impact of recent technologies on community cohesion to systemic forms of discrimination.

‘FACING MIDDLETOWN’ PARTNERS

Dr. John West, Urban Planning Department, Ball State University

‘Facing Middletown,’ with its unique lister/ storyteller model, creates an opportunity to more clearly understand Muncie, and by extension communities like it. The challenge of studying cities is that they are both physical places where people live and representational crucibles through which people understand society and their role in it. The lived experience of people living in small, midwestern, rust belt towns has been drowned out of popular and political discourse by a cacophony of narratives that serve powerful interests. "Cities are broken hellscapes, the Midwest is where 'real Americans' live, cities that fail to thrive should be abandoned like outmoded technology because they are no longer competitive". I look forward to working closely with the Center for Middletown Studies, and the Facing Project to unearth new perspectives on Muncie through this project and I will invite my colleagues in the planning department to find ways to support this project through coursework and study.”

Ken Hudson, ED, Whitely Community Council

“We believe recording history and community experiences is vital to the process of reflection and understanding past and current events for maintaining a healthy community. In addition, placing stories in a format that can be shared for years to come for the purposes of educating the public provides the Whitely Community Council with an increased incentive for supporting this project.”

Dr. Patrick Collier, Everyday Life in Middletown, Ball State University

“The tradition of Middletown Studies has taught me that—while Muncie may not be typical or representative—it is a place where transformations in U.S. history have powerfully hit home repeatedly. And I value the fact that scholars have worked to capture how people lived these transformations. We need more conversation. We need to know more about how our neighbors feel and think and how they live their lives. Only that will overcome the hostility and stereotyping that, while part of human nature, are particularly destructive and pervasive in the current political and media environment.”

Jacquie Hannoman, PhD, Ross Community Center

Middletown Studies is not only known here in the US but is widely studied in sociology curricula worldwide, without mentioning which small city it is. As a sociology student in Latin America, it was my first interpretative lens into what the societal dynamics of a 'typical' small American city in the heart of the US were at the beginning of the 20th century. It was intriguing to us as Latin Americans that it was represented as a quite homogeneous society, with such little diversity. We knew it was a warped representation, but did not know how much. Coming to Muncie and discovering that this is the Middletown I had studied was quite exciting, while at the same time shocking just how these studies had omitted the social tapestry of this city. Facing Middletown is going to allow us to portray - and hopefully understand - the rich racial, ethnic, cultural, political, religious, and economic diversity that exists today in this city in which we live. One hundred years on, our Middletown is one of the mirrors of the center of America, a place of changing dynamics, and understanding how it is seen, and wants to be seen, through the eyes of its people is crucial to understanding our roles in strengthening our community life, and that of our nation.

Nate Howard, Muncie Land Bank

If we do not tell the truth about our neighborhoods today...their strengths, struggles, and histories...we risk letting silence and neglect become our legacy. The Muncie Land Bank is committed to changing that story by listening, learning, and acting...so that today’s challenges and liabilities can become tomorrow’s assets.

J.P. Hall, Center for Historic Preservation, Ball State University

“The Middletown Studies have revealed to me that Muncie is not about economics or demographics - it is about how people orient themselves within a place, how memory, history, and the built environment shape who we are. Understanding Muncie’s past helps us see not just where we have been, but how our surroundings shape our community identity. When we are aware of this, we become more intentional about creating places that foster connection, belonging, and a collective sense of meaning. A meaningful life requires orientation - knowing where you are, how you got here, and how you fit into the broader story of Muncie. Engaging with history is not about looking back; it is about understanding our position within it. That sense of connection - of being part of something larger within time and space - grounds us, shapes who we are, and informs the way we build Muncie together.”

FACING MIDDLETOWN FACILITATORS

J.R. Jamison, Co-founder and President, The Facing Project

“Stories are the basis for empathy, understanding, and action, and we have seen this across the 100-plus Facing Projects that have been organized in 20 U.S. states and within diverse geographic populations and demographics. To date, over 3,500 stories have been captured that have inspired the expansion of community-based services for food insecurity and housing, training for state police on autism and disabilities, and policy changes through city ordinances. What is unique about our storytelling model, and will be true in Facing Middletown, is that this is not research on the community but rather an opportunity to listen and learn from each other.”

Aimee Robertson-West, Vice President, The Facing Project

“What happens in this place matters, for better or worse, because if it is happening here, it is happening everywhere. Muncie is not special. It is representative and that is why it is important. Yes. As a Muncie native, it is special to me and to its people, but ‘special’ is a story that enables the belief that we are magically immune from change; that belief robs us of the will to do the work required to make our community resilient to imminent change. The human brain develops more complex neural pathways in the face of adversities, making it more resilient and better at problem-solving. The same can be true for cities who embrace the lessons they learn. Muncie can be one of those places. The inspiration behind ‘Facing Middletown’ is to see with clear eyes the tension between our past and acknowledgment of where we are today. Perhaps “Facing Middletown” can help communities like Muncie do the same, too.

‘Facing Middletown’ is a reverse-engineered view of Muncie, as it is, and is also an act of collective care to this end. After looking back at the production of Facing Projects and the use of our active empathy engagement model across the United States, what we know is that no matter who we are or where we come from, facing adverse experiences with others who are experiencing the same, repairs relational and community damage, improves outcomes, reduces tension, loneliness, and conflict. Most importantly, we have seen that empathy amplified through Facing projects builds lasting connectedness, offers second chances, saves lives, and has the capacity to stop violence before it happens, as evident in Richard McKinney’s Facing Project story ’The Anger is Mine’ (2016)’ as written by Tom Steiner. Richard’s story went on to inspire Academy award-nominated film ’Stranger at the Gate.’ produced by Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai and directed by Joshua Seftel. No. Muncie is not special but is instead a gritty and worthy narrator to serve as America’s mirror and pulse-check in 2025. During times of transition, civic cheerleading can only go so far. Story by story, empathy can take us all the way home. The future of Muncie will not be written by someone, somewhere else. It is determined by the people who are here, today.”

For all press inquiries and for participation questions contact Facing Middletown’s facilitators: facingmiddletown@facingproject.com

For people with accessibility or mobility barriers who wish to participate, contact the facilitators and the production team will meet you where you are.

ABOUT THE FACING PROJECT:

Founded in Muncie, Indiana, The Facing Project is a national nonprofit that creates a more understanding and empathetic world through stories that inspire action. The organization brings people and communities together through acts of empathy that include listening, storytelling, and connecting across differences with the belief that stories are the most powerful tool for change. More at www.facingproject.com.

ABOUT THE CENTER FOR MIDDLETOWN STUDIES:

Housed at Ball State University, the Center for Middletown Studies builds on the body of scholarship inaugurated by Robert S. and Helen Merrell Lynd in their landmark studies Middletown (1929) and Middletown in Transition (1937). These in-depth accounts of life in Muncie, Indiana, became classic sociological studies and established the community as a barometer of social trends in the United States. The sponsors of the original Middletown investigation framed it as a “small-city study,” and that concept provides a foundation for the Center’s work. In addition to building on the scholarship about Muncie conducted by the Lynds and their many successors, the Center supports research examining the history, present condition, and prospects of smaller cities and towns, particularly in the American Midwest.

More at https://www.bsu.edu/academics/centersandinstitutes/middletown.

Stay updated:

www.facingmiddletown.com

Stay connected:

Become a Middletown Documenter, share your photos, videos, stories, and questions.

Reach out at facingmiddletown@facingproject.com

Follow:

Facebook: /Facing Middletown

Instagram: /Facing Middletown

‘Facing Middletown’ is made possible in part through support from the Community Foundation of Muncie & Delaware County.

Contact:

Aimee Robertson-West