Department of Anthropology || News

11:19 PM, Feb. 29, 2012

It’s been only a month, but I’m convinced that Indianapolis has come up with a surrogate obsession for the Super Bowl: community engagement.

In the past week, I’ve sat through three meetings put on by three very different organizations, all asking the same questions: How can we better engage the community? How can we make sure our decisions reflect what residents truly want? How can we be part of the process? These are all serious questions, especially at a time when Indianapolis is undergoing such rapid changes. More than ever, the wishes of average residents are at risk of being ignored in the name of progress.

And so community engagement has become an obsession in a lot of circles.

Take the discussion Wednesday during the Joseph T. Taylor Symposium at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. Put on by the School of Liberal Arts, the audience of mostly academics spent hours talking about ways to connect with residents—from increasing access to higher education to embarking on anthropology projects.

(Full disclosure: I was moderator of one of the panels at the symposium.)

To me, though, the most important question that IUPUI officials can ask is: What can we offer that government agencies and other institutions can’t when it comes to community engagement?

From my perch, the answer is a lot.

Lewis Jones, a doctoral student at the Department of Anthropology at IU Bloomington, put it best. When government agencies, companies and non-profits want to know what people think about a particular project, "they want information fast."

Think about the paltry way the city solicited public opinion about whether to rename Georgia Street. Or the fiasco with the Central Indiana Community Foundation over plans to install a slave sculpture on the Cultural Trail.

Time and time again, officials have been criticized for not getting the real pulse of the public, for not engaging the community. Universities go about things in a different way. They do research for the sake of research., not research for the sake of getting a particular answer to a particular question on a particular timetable. Professors and their students take the time to build relationships with people. And with relationships come trust. And with trust comes engagement.

Take, for example, a project led by IUPUI’s Department of Anthropology called "A Neighborhood of Saturdays." It’s an ongoing project to record the history of a tiny neighborhood on the Near Southside that was home to Jewish and black residents until the 1960s. The project was born of nothing more than curiosity about three years ago, when Susan B. Hyatt, an associate professor of anthropology at IUPUI, met a former resident. Then she met another resident and another and found it interesting that the neighborhood had integrated so early on.

Soon, Hyatt had the idea of sending students out to talk to former residents and record the neighborhood history. On Wednesday, about a dozen residents involved in the project attended the symposium. They didn’t have to be there. Yet they were more engaged in the discussion than many of the professors.

That’s where IUPUI can shine.

It can engage the broader community in a way that perhaps no other institution in Indianapolis can. It can create a long-term dialogue and build relationships of trust so that when progress does occur in Indianapolis, most of us may feel like we had a part in it. "We have a responsibility as educators," Jones said. "We have a responsibility as researchers to go out and tell those stories." Like I said, that is serious stuff.

Contact Star columnist Erika D. Smith at (317) 444-6424, erika.smith@indystar.com, on Facebook or on Twitter: @indystar_erika.

Chris Glidden received the Langsam-Oswalt Fellowship Grant for lecturers for Summer II 2011 working with the Children’s Museum and the Sheridan Teachers up at the Boxley Cabin.

2010 Sam Masarachia Scholars In the foreground, from left to right: Daniel Branstrator, Dr. Sue Hyatt, Heather Meloy, Courtney Singleton
May 07

Anthropology Majors and Scholarship Awardees Olaniyan Scholar Courtney Singleton (left, graduating senior) and Heather Meloy
May 07

Dr. Susan Hyatt and Masarchia mentees Heather Meloy (left) and Courtney Singleton
May 07

2010 Mary F. Crisler Scholars Anthropology majors in foreground, from right to left: Heather Meloy, Nova Hornsby, Patricia Jordan
May 17

Experts from Liberal Arts departments and centers are regularly cited in the local, national, and international media. A selection from online sources provides a sampling of the types of issues and kinds of research Liberal Arts faculty are called upon to talk about in the public sphere. Also included is general Liberal Arts news covered by the media.

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