As one travels through the heart of Indiana—past the cornfields and echoes of basketball greatness — we move from place to place, moment to moment. But when the lights go down, and our stories feel closer to the end than the beginning, the tales that truly matter are the ones passed down from generation to generation, from house to house, in picture frames on the walls at Sunday dinner.
Muncie has a rich history etched into the streets, neighborhoods and landmarks of the city. For over a century, that history has been closely studied, categorized and preserved through the Middletown research project. Beginning in the 1920s, sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd came to Muncie to document the lives of everyday Americans. Their work — known as the Middletown Studies — aimed to capture how average Americans go about their day-to-day lives in a mid-sized Midwestern city.
RELATED: The shift of Middletown studies
The studies provided a unique window into daily life, but also highlighted a challenge: when life in a community is carefully documented, it can create a picture of stability that isn’t always the reality. As communities rise and fall with the tides of change, the stories of those waves are often told best by the people who live them. That’s the vision guiding lifetime Muncie native Aimee Robertson West, co-chair and director of the Facing Muncie project. Launched in 2025, the initiative seeks to capture the everyday lives of residents through photographs and oral narratives accompanied by digital Reels produced by the residents themselves, offering a mosaic of perspectives that go beyond statistics or census data.
For Aimee, the project isn’t just about documenting faces; it’s about honoring the voices and lived experiences that too often go unheard. Each portrait tells a story, forming a collective narrative of what it means to call Muncie home today.
“I convened a group of people representing a wide variety of communities in Muncie in the hopes that we would get some really strong and truthful stories about Muncie in 2025,” Aimee said.
To document the everyday lives of Muncie residents in 2025, Aimee and the others involved with the Facing Muncie project decided to shy away from a traditional documentary style. With the advent of digital technology, they chose instead to let residents tell their own stories — capturing faces and voices through their own lenses to reflect the rhythms of everyday life.
“Interviews can tend to create a manufactured experience… There’s no person asking uncomfortable questions. It is them showing us their pets, routines, meals, lives and places on their own terms,” Aimee said.
The backbone of Facing Muncie is its reliance on community leaders and organizations. Their participation in outreach programs has been central to the project, engaging directly with residents. By working hand-in-hand with the people who shape neighborhoods every day, the project aims to depict a fuller, more accurate picture of what it means to live in Muncie.
One participant Aimee enlisted was Pastor Neil Kring. Neil has a strong relationship with residents and works in the Thomas Avondale neighborhood, a post-industrial area that, Aimee said, has suffered a lot of trauma.
“I think it’s really important to capture not only the nice stories about Muncie, but also the stories about struggle and what we can do better. Even the people studying Middletown would say that, while they are experts in research, there is still a lot to learn about the different communities of people in Muncie,” Aimee said.
The project aims to look at stories as a collection of authentic moments and empathetic crossroads in people’s lives, captured through video collection and personal stories presented in the form of a book.
This project carries a distinct undertone: the pages and videos will feature different faces, different stories, different lives and different conclusions, but together, they form a collage of unseen and forgotten narratives about people simply trying to get by, year after year.
For Aimee, the magical piece of this project is highlighting people and stories that most wouldn’t notice or think of the ones that often go unseen or uncredited at first glance within the community.
Through her work with the Facing Project, Aimee has been involved in advocating for autism awareness and disability representation by amplifying personal stories and lived experiences within the Muncie community, often working behind the scenes without public recognition.
Over the years, she’s helped organize bridge dinners to bring neighbors together and open up conversations about differences. She collaborated with authors and helped bring Muncie’s history and culture to life on the page.
“I hope people watch this documentary and read this book and they understand people who are different than they are,” Aimee said. “It’s a really important way to relate with one another in a time where that seems impossible.”
The legacy of the Middletown Studies is deeply rooted in the industrial heartbeat of early America, a lens through which Muncie has long been observed. That legacy, however, often sits in the shadow of the country’s earliest industrial titans.
“The role of the center is to promote research about Muncie as Middletown, but also to support research about the issues that were raised in the Middletown Studies, and particularly the challenges that communities like Muncie, that were once highly industrialized and are now post-industrial, they lost their industry, and they’re trying to redefine themselves,” James Connolly, director of the Center for Middletown Studies and Ball State history professor said.
The Lins family structured their landmark study in Muncie by categorizing daily life into six distinct domains: domestic life, civic engagement, religion, education, economic activity, and leisure. This breakdown allowed them to analyze the cultural fabric of Muncie as a microcosm of America during a pivotal time in its industrial growth.
While Muncie of today looks markedly different, with a shifting economy and evolving demographics, the echoes of those early findings still shape how researchers and residents alike think about the city’s identity.
Now, Middletown Studies is partnering with the Facing Muncie project to build on that first-person, human-centered approach. By aligning their initiatives, they’re bridging historic research with lived experiences, putting names, faces and real stories behind the data.
“I’ve been able to study and understand different aspects of people’s experiences. When you have these firsthand accounts, when they talk about how they feel, those things are usually not the kind of evidence that historians have much access to,” James said.
James and the Middletown Studies team have documented Muncie’s evolution over the years. With new initiatives like Facing Muncie, he hopes these efforts continue to help the campus and community better understand one another and interact more deeply in the process.
The streets and factories may look different and the photos may no longer be black and white, but the city still has something to say. People like James and Aimee will continue documenting whatever the next hundred years have in store.
This article is a part of Ball Bearings Fall 2025 magazine: The Archival Edition. Read more stories online at ballbearingsmag.com and pick up the print edition of the magazine across Ball State’s campus now.
