Jennifer Erickson is Professor of Anthropology at Ball State University and the instructor of this immersive urban anthropology course. In addition to urban anthropology, she teaches courses on race and power, gender and sexuality, critical social theory, Anthropology of the United States, and ethnographic methods. She has conducted research on refugee resettlement in the United States for more than 20 years as well as gender in post-conflict zones and the cultural politics of taxes. She has been at Ball State for 15 years and also serves as the Assistant Director of the Center for Middletown Studies. You can find out more about here work here.
Eli Jones is the Director of Academic Innovation and Community Engagement at Burris Laboratory School and a current Ph.D. student. His research centers on student agency, teacher action, lab school models, and critical action pedagogy. Eli is passionate about rethinking traditional structures in education and exploring how lab schools can serve as sites for transformative practice. As part of the anthropology project, he has contributed to the qualitative questioning group, helping to design open-ended, inquiry-based questions that promote authentic dialogue and reflection for both the moving interviews and semi-structured interviews.
Adrienne Baker is pursuing dual master’s degrees in Urban Planning and Historic Preservation. Her work centers on the adaptive reuse of historic structures to reduce urban sprawl, address environmental challenges, and maintain cultural identity. She is also interested in engaging communities through the arts to build connections and encourage public participation. As part of an immersive learning course, she contributed to a series of zines exploring urban anthropology, placemaking, historic preservation, and sustainability. She also used GIS to create a map of The Village, featured in a StoryMap that integrates historical photos to link the neighborhood’s past and present.
Lauren M Shank is a graduate student in urban planning who contributed to analysis of the policies shaping the Village Revitalization. She has undergraduate degrees in Anthropology and Sociology and enjoys applying storytelling, community engagement, and social theory to urban planning and policy. She currently works as a graduate assistant for Indy’s Department of Metropolitan Development assisting with administering affordable housing grants and strategies, and as a neighborhood planner in Fort Wayne.
Aubrey Charron is currently pursuing her Bachelor’s of Science in Anthropology at Ball State University. In this project, Aubrey was on the archives and StoryMap team. This team was in charge of going back through the history of the village. This includes pictures, street names, business changes, and even going as far as coding them all. The team uploaded them into a story map and made an interactive timeline map for people to get a better view of the village. They explored the history of the village but also the patterns that the village’s past holds when it came to why this revitalization was assumed to be necessary. The patterns of businesses leaving and how often they were able to stay were also recorded in this data. Using this data this project hope’s to find out more about the urbanization occurring in the village.
Connor Russell is pursuing a Bachelor’s degree in Anthropology. As a part of the anthropology project, he has helped with qualitative interviews and designing questions for these interviews, making sure that these questions will get the most information they can. He is also working on the qualitative interview side of things, taking surveys from this project, which people took and analyzing that data to figure out common occurrences or places visited in the community of the village.
Ashley Stockall is studying Anthropology and Natural Resource Management. She was a part of the group who made and distributed the zines.
Abbigail Tuttle is a student pursuing her Bachelor’s in Anthropology with minors in History and Ancient Studies. She has worked interned in two museums to pursue a career in Collections and Archives. Her contributions to this project include archival research, Middletown research, website design, poster design, and interviewing.
Khloe Williams is an Anthropology major and Chinese minor. She worked in the Zines group creating designs for the the Zines.
Paige Otto is an undergraduate student majoring in Anthropology with a minor in Linguistics. Her academic interests focus on exploring the intersections of race, gender, class, and language in the U.S. They were deeply involved in the scan-a-thon component of our project, where they played a key role in analyzing and coding interviews to help uncover meaningful patterns and insights about the village.
Jackson Roesler is an first year student majoring in Anthropology with a minor in Japanese language and Women and Gender Studies. He will be studying in South Korea during the fall semester of 2025. He mainly worked on writings for this website.
June Adenodi is an sophomore undergraduate student majoring in Applied Cybersecurity. June worked with the zine group on this project, contributing to the zine’s design work.
Kaleb Antonacci is a junior undergraduate student majoring in History and minoring in Classical cultures and Anthropology, with a special interest in Ancient Rome and Greece. In this project, Kaleb worked with qualitative interviews and working with qualitative data gathered from people responding to questions about the village. Kaleb is also very active on campus and the surrounding community of Muncie, being a proud member of Sigma Nu fraternity and the InterFraternity council, he is always present in community service, philanthropy, and recruitment events.
Allie Ransom is a 3rd year undergraduate at Ball State University. She studies Public History and Anthropology with a minor in Classic Cultures. Her main focus in her majors is studying evolutionary changes in humans and how history evolves with us. She was part of the Scanathon project team and helped gather photos from Ball State Alumni.
Olivia Jordan is a current sophomore here at Ball State pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Anthropology with a minor in religious studies. She originally joined the project in 2024, via the Teachers Scholar Program, and has continued to work on the project since. She was the leader of the Archives and StoryMap group. Her main focus is on the use of City Directories to show trends in the village throughout time, starting in 1925 and ending in 2023.
Preston McCutcheon is a current sophomore undergraduate student majoring in Anthropology. His concentration is in biological anthropology with interests in human evolution. Preston was involved with the policy group and was tasked with background information and history for the website.
Isabel Cloyd-Annarino is a senior about to graduate. Her Bachelors with be in psychology with minors in anthropology and criminology. She was part of the Scan-A-thon group that gathered photos from Ball State alumni and helped code the interviews collected by the whole team. Interviewees ranged from present students to alumni , these interviews helped uncover thoughts, and feeling about the village itself and the revitalization.