Communication, Media, and Performance

Emily Chivers Yochim, Ph.D., associate professor in the Allegheny College Department of Communication, Film and Theatre, is one of 25 faculty members selected by Project Pericles to teach new, innovative courses in the Andrew W. Mellon Periclean Faculty Leadership (PFL) Program in the Humanities.

This program connects the humanities and liberal arts learning to challenges facing the wider campus community and society more broadly. In collaboration with community partners, Mellon Periclean Faculty Leaders (PFLs) create courses across the humanities that incorporate community-based projects addressing six grand challenges: Climate Change, Education Access, Immigration, Mass Incarceration, Race and Inequality, and Voter Engagement. Project Pericles provides a grant of $4,000 for each PFL to support these civic engagement activities on their campus and in their communities.

Through the PFL program, Yochim will teach a course titled Media Ethnography. Students in the course will conduct interviews with community members to produce The Meadiaville Listening Project, a podcast featuring stories about entanglements of media and everyday life in Meadville. Upcoming seasons of the podcast will focus on the ongoing opioid crisis and Meadville’s recovery community. Yochim will develop and teach this course in partnership with Meadville Calendar, an organization that provides a community platform for promoting local events and initiatives, and Not One More Northwest PA, a drug abuse prevention program.

“The Periclean Faculty Leadership Program is a fantastic opportunity to deepen the collaborations between The Meadiaville Listening Project and the Meadville community,” Yochim said. “Students in the class have loved the relationships that they have developed with Meadville community members through the Meadiaville podcast, and this grant will help us to make those relationships even stronger. I’m very much looking forward to partnering with Meadville Calendar and Not One More Northwest PA to explore how local media can contribute to tackling big, complicated issues like the opioid epidemic.”

Project Pericles is a consortium of more than 30 colleges and universities that promotes civic engagement within higher education and is based in New York City. Allegheny is one of the original 10 schools on which Project Pericles was founded in 2000.

David Roncolato, Ph.D., is director of civic engagement in the Allegheny Gateway and the college’s Project Pericles program director. “This is a wonderful initiative from Project Pericles,” Roncolato said. “I am thrilled that Emily applied and was selected to represent Allegheny College. She will be a remarkable contributor to this Project Pericles community of scholars.”

Presidents and provosts on each campus nominated faculty members with demonstrated leadership potential who can make significant contributions on their campuses and in their communities. Nominations were submitted in collaboration with one or more community partners, ranging from an abbess in a nunnery to the acting assistant commissioner from the department of corrections. Community partners provided letters of support, making the vision for these courses powerful. Academic experts serving as outside evaluators then reviewed all applications before final selections were made.

Project Pericles’ outside evaluators were impressed with the excellent quality of the proposals and commented, “This cohort of proposals has tremendous potential to influence pedagogy on liberal arts campuses across the nation. Each in its own way pushes the envelope around what liberal learning can entail—inviting new approaches to civic engagement, activist learning, and community-based education,” and “Each will make a difference in the lives of their students, in the quality of life of their communities, and in the teaching of the humanities.”

This newly selected cohort of PFLs will spend 2020-2021 in conversation with their community partners to fine-tune their community-based projects and course requirements before the courses are taught in 2021-2022. The faculty represent a diverse and dynamic group of professors from recent Ph.D.s to full professors and department chairs in a wide range of disciplines including: Asian Studies, Culture and Economy, Education, English, Environmental Studies, French and Francophone Studies, Latinx Studies, Media and Communications, Music, Peace and Social Justice Studies, Philosophy, Religion, Rhetoric Studies, Spanish, Theater, and Women’s and Gender Studies.

This select group joins an earlier cohort of Mellon PFLs and expands the vibrant, national community of PFLs dedicated to incorporating civic engagement into the curriculum while empowering students to use their academic knowledge to tackle real-world problems. PFLs reflect together and inspire each other. As part of the program, PFLs share their pedagogical approaches, experiences, and evaluations with higher education, more generally, through scholarly presentations and publications. They have a tremendous influence on their colleagues on their campus and across the nation, exemplifying how the humanities are enhanced by meaningful campus-community relationships.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and The Eugene M. Lang Foundation supported this national initiative, recognizing the power of the PFL Program to highlight the relevancy of the humanities. Project Pericles shares with The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation the goal of supporting the humanities, and the liberal arts more generally, in long-term sustainable ways, and in addressing real-world concerns. Prior support was provided by The Arthur Vining Davis Foundations (AVDF) and The Teagle Foundation. Additionally, AVDF recently awarded Project Pericles $300,000 to launch a PFL Program in STEM and Social Sciences, complementing the Mellon PFL Program in the Humanities.

Source: Academics, Publications & Research

A year ago, Marley Parish, Alex Weidenhof and Ellis Giacomelli had just received their diplomas from Allegheny College. They now find themselves as community journalists working for local newspapers and covering the impacts of the worldwide pandemic that is perhaps the biggest ongoing story since World War II.

All three of the 2019 graduates and former staff members of The Campus found their callings at local newspapers — Parish works for the Centre Daily Times, Weidenhof at the Cranberry Eagle, both in Pennsylvania, and Giacomelli at the Watertown Daily Times in upstate New York.

“The only thing you can plan for in life is uncertainty, and the pandemic reaffirms that,” Parish says. “Covering such a complex story is a responsibility I do not take lightly. I pay attention to the numbers — how many people have been tested, the number of confirmed cases, the death toll. That data, paired with personal stories, localizes a global situation and highlights how Centre County has been impacted. I’ve learned more than I thought possible in nearly three months of COVID-19 coverage. It’s not easy, but I know it has and will continue to make me a better storyteller.”

Adds Weidenhof: “The Campus’ adviser my freshman year, Cheryl Hatch, always told us that reporting is about being able to adapt. This is absolutely good practice for that. In the span of a couple of months, we’ve had to change all of our beats, become health reporters, then labor reporters, then move back into our beats while still figuring out how to cover the pandemic. That’s at least something I can take away from this positively.”

Although the mostly rural and suburban areas they report on have not been “hotspots” for the coronavirus outbreak, the pandemic still works its way into almost every story they cover.

“As a journalist, my primary role is to inform the public through storytelling, and good storytelling demands context,” Giacomelli says. “So at this point, stories about school board budget proposals or hospital wing construction cannot be told without addressing how the COVID-19 crisis may have an impact.”

“Since mid-March, I’ve written perhaps a handful of stories that haven’t in some way pertained to the virus,” says Weidenhof. “The pandemic and the resulting economic impact of mitigation efforts have wormed their way into every facet of a local newspaper’s pages, from work and school closures, to health worries, to municipal governments figuring out how to prepare for the ensuing drop in tax revenue.”

These journalists have found their news sources and most of the general public don’t harbor hostility toward the news media.

“When I started a year ago, I was shocked at how forthcoming and accessible most people were,” Parish says. “That responsiveness has only grown. The media is no stranger to being vilified, but at the end of the day, we’re storytellers tasked with reporting the truth. County commissioners, public health professionals and school administrators recognize the widespread feeling of uncertainty, and most want to provide answers. Officials aren’t embarrassed to admit when they don’t have them yet.”

“Gauging sources is a big part of being a good journalist, and it’s important to strike a balance between being sensitive to and empathetic about deeply personal stories, and advocating to sources that those stories be told,” Giacomelli says. “Every source is different. Some people love to talk — about anything and everything — and others, not so much.”

An Allegheny education definitely helped them navigate a new career in rapidly changing times, they say.

“Allegheny’s Journalism in the Public Interest Program pushed me to honor that eagerness and develop an understanding of journalistic integrity and the essentiality of journalistic freedom in democratic systems,” says Giacomelli. The small, but powerful, team of Allegheny educators committed to the JPI program has worked tirelessly to engage students in the art, history and the profession of journalism. I chose to be part of the professional journalism world because of them, and continue to learn more every day. And The Campus showed me what a newsroom is — a collection of eccentric people, often buzzed on caffeine and always ready to tell stories.”

Says Weidenhof: “A year before this all hit, I was writing a fake article about a make-believe measles outbreak for my epidemiology final. Now, I’m writing real articles about an actual coronavirus pandemic for a newspaper. This is significantly less fun.”

“Allegheny taught me to attack challenges head-on, and The Campus prepared me for just about anything,” says Parish. “Former staffers will tell you that my unofficial title as editor was ‘crisis manager.’ With computers crashing, stories falling through and technology snafus happening more often than I still care to admit, we overcame every challenge. Fortitude is the mentality I continue to live by. In the event that I forget, my office — located in a State College apartment — is decorated with framed Campus newspapers, my Allegheny diploma, and my email usually has a message from former professors who continue to encourage me from afar.”

Source: Academics, Publications & Research

Allegheny College senior Charles Allen Ross has been awarded the Dr. James H. Mullen, Jr. Student Prize for Civility in Public Life, which annually recognizes student leaders who have demonstrated a strong passion for, and deep understanding of, civility on the Allegheny College campus and in community work.

Prize recipients exhibit a depth and breadth of activities, roles, responsibilities, and years of involvement that have a significant impact on civility and respect on the campus and beyond.

Ross is a community and justice studies major with minors in education studies and theatre. He has served as president of the Men of Color Advancement Association (MOCAA), an America Reads student tutor, and a member of the Allegheny football team, among many other roles on campus and in the community. Learn more about Ross on the Dr. James H. Mullen, Jr. Student Prize for Civility in Public Life website.

The Dr. James H. Mullen, Jr. Student Prize for Civility in Public Life is modeled after the national Allegheny College Prize for Civility in Public Life, which was established in 2011. The student prize was established in 2017 and renamed in honor of Mullen upon his retirement after 11 years of service as Allegheny’s president.

Source: Academics, Publications & Research

From offering advice on social media to holding “online office hours” to assembling a reading list to educate and inform, Allegheny College faculty members are working to help students grapple with the COVID-19 crisis and the shift to off-campus, remote learning.

Allegheny students currently are on their spring break but will start remote classes March 25 for the remainder of the semester.

Matthew Venesky, assistant professor of biology and an infectious disease ecologist, is one of the faculty members offering online guidance for Allegheny’s students. He has invited students to a Twitter dialogue for those who want more information about social distancing or basic concepts related to disease transmission.

“I’m hopeful that with this being the new normal, that there are conversations between students and their families and between students and their professors about the basics of disease transmission,” said Venesky. “I would encourage students to reach out to faculty with their questions and concerns. We are all in this together.”

Venesky said he is conducting a senior project group meeting with eight seniors via Google Meet this week. “We’re looking to just stay in touch with one another and say ‘Hi’ and talk about things. I pitched the idea and all eight emailed back within minutes wanting to do it,” he said.

Eric Pallant, chair of the Environmental Science and Sustainability Department, has this to share with his students:

“If there is a central theme for the Department of Environmental Science & Sustainability, it is that we work to solve real-world problems in our classes and make the world a better place outside of them. Our ability to be flexible and creative distinguishes Allegheny ESS majors from their counterparts at any other college or university.

“So here we go. The world as we know it is changing. … We’ll figure it out. Together. That’s what we do. It’s time to apply your flexibility and creativity.

“Frankly, I couldn’t ask for a better family of faculty, staff, and students with whom to get through this and come out the other side the better for it. Stay connected to your friends, classmates, and instructors while you are away. Ask questions as you have them, and we will all do our best to find answers.”

Added Pallant: “Every professor in my department has said over and over they will do whatever it takes to deliver the best education possible to their students. Not one of them has complained. … That includes professors teaching labs in forests and streams and professors teaching Geographic Information Systems to students who will no longer have access to the software only available in our GIS computer lab. They are all figuring out a way to make it happen. I suspect that is true among faculty across campus. What an amazing group of colleagues.”

Emily Chivers Yochim, associate professor of communication arts and theatre, said she has assured her senior advisees that their Allegheny careers will be celebrated when everyone can get together again. “I’ve been supporting my students in the best way that I know how — reaching out to them to let them know that I am thinking of them and that we are all watching out for their best interests,” Yochim said. “I’ve texted and talked by phone with a few, including alumni, who are feeling at sea. And I’ve emailed my advisees to let them know that I am available for video chat, texts, or phone calls at any time.

“I’m seeing Allegheny at its best — caring for our students,” Yochim added. “Even when I was a student (Class of 2000) I could see that Allegheny is a very caring community that’s always looking out for students, and I’m seeing that shine through now.”

Becky Dawson, assistant professor of global health studies and biology, has kept up an exhausting schedule of media appearances in the Erie area and serving on panel discussions about the coronavirus. She is an expert in epidemiology and global health challenges, researching disease risk factors and patterns of disease in human populations. She also has found the time to correspond with students about the outbreak.

Ken Pinnow, professor of history and global health studies, is compiling a reading list that he is sharing with the Allegheny community. “I have compiled a short list of readings about past epidemics as a way to promote wider thinking about our responses to COVID-19,” Pinnow said. “History can be a powerful way to not only contextualize the present but to reflect on ourselves. The readings cover a number of topics germane to the challenges that we’re facing at the moment.”

Amelia Finaret, assistant professor of global health studies, is writing poetry and at some point will share with her students. “Otherwise, I am just trying to email them a lot and stay positive,” Finaret says.

She shared the draft of her poem. It begins:

There is no school for a while, starting this week,
In the hope that this pandemic doesn’t get too bleak.
Especially for our elderly friends,
Working together so that lives don’t end.

We will walk, play, and read at home,
And remember we are lucky to not be alone.
Tag-team childcare, no dates with friends to play,
We will also bake a lot, so our fears don’t stay.

For everyone, everywhere, keeping a routine,
May be key to a bearable quarantine.
We will take a family picture every day
To remember this time in a historic way.

Source: Academics, Publications & Research

Close your eyes. Take a deep breath. Hold it and picture a field of poppies glistening in the sunlight among the rolling green hills. You are peaceful. You are floating among the clouds. Now exhale slowly and feel the love.

Joshua Searle-White has dropped plenty of coin to hear gurus share visions like this in workshop settings through the years. In the process he developed a love-hate relationship with the self-help and new-age movements — some of the philosophies and practices might seem strange and nonsensical, he says, but by the end of each weekend, he’s glad he stuck it out.

Searle-White, professor emeritus of psychology at Allegheny College, explores that relationship in a one-person stage production that he will preview in Meadville on October 26 before taking it to the bright lights of New York City in an off-Broadway show on November 3.

The play is called “The Weekend Workshop,” and it’s the story of a man who is pressured into going to a workshop because he is told he needs to “find himself.” Searle-White describes the show as “simultaneously a scathing critique of and a love letter to the self-help and new-age movements.”

“The new-age movement is low-hanging fruit,” says Searle-White, who retired in 2018 after 22 years of teaching at Allegheny. “It’s easy to make fun of it, but at the same time I love it.”

In “The Weekend Workshop,” the hero confronts the question: “What is the difference between something that is just goofy and something that is utterly profound?” The 90-minute production includes energetic staging, clever wordplay and lots of physical comedy.

Searle-White has behind-the-scenes assistance in the production from Dan Winston, a 2010 Allegheny graduate, who is the director; LeeAnn Yeckley, the technical director of Allegheny’s Playshop Theatre, who is the stage manager, and Noah Stape, a junior at Allegheny, who is the lighting operator.

“When Josh came to me with his idea for an original show and asked me to direct, I had no hesitations,” says Winston. “It’s unlike any other show I’ve ever worked on or seen. Josh performs it entirely on his own, splitting himself between seven unique and fully-realized characters. You’d think having only one actor on stage would make the show monotonous or that it would be difficult to have interactions between characters, but we worked really hard on fleshing out each character and blocking the show so that you feel like the characters are really alive in front of you, even when Josh is playing someone else.”

The show grew out of one of the courses Searle-White taught called “The Human Potential Movement,” and it takes on all sorts of new-age practices from eye-gazing to trust falls and cuddle puddles. Searle-White plays all the characters, which include the unnamed hero, Steve, Kip, Candy, Max, Star Thunder Hawk Flower (yes, that’s really what she calls herself!), and, of course, the Guru. “Everything that I make fun of in this play, I have done myself,” he says. “I love all of it. But I also resist it with my entire being. I sign up for workshops, but then when the time comes actually to go, I start making up excuses for why I shouldn’t or imagine all the other things I could be doing instead. But despite my resistance, and despite the many difficulties with these workshops, I keep going.”

The production in New York City is part of the three-month United Solo Theatre Festival, which features one-person shows and is the largest of its kind in the world. Searle-White and his crew will have 15 minutes to prepare the stage, 45 minutes for a technical rehearsal, 90 minutes for the play, and then 15 minutes to clear the stage. “It’s a real challenge,” he says.

Searle-White is not new to the stage, having appeared in some Meadville Community Theatre productions. He has also taught storytelling at Allegheny. “I’ve always loved the creative process. I’ve written stories and performed them for years, but I’ve never tried a full-length show until now,” he says. He currently is working on another play aimed at college students that will explore the issues of sexuality, relationships and consent, which will debut in Meadville in the spring of 2020.

“The Weekend Workshop” will be staged at 7 p.m. on Saturday, October 26, in the Montgomery Performance Space on Allegheny’s campus. The show is free and open to the public; the show is recommended for adults only (not suitable for children). The one-time staging off-Broadway will be held in Theatre Row at 410 West 42nd St. in New York City at 2 p.m. on Sunday, November 3. The theater holds about 60 patrons, and admission will be $54.

In the meantime, take another deep breath. Feel the love. Namaste.

Source: Academics, Publications & Research

What started as an idea for a communication arts class several years ago has turned into a meaningful and engaging project for dozens of Allegheny students and residents of Meadville.

It has even inspired one former student to embark on a self-made career following his graduation.

The Meadiaville Listening Project is the creation of Associate Professor Emily Chivers Yochim. The course that spawned the project is in its third year, and Yochim says it is helping to change the way students view their education.

“I want them to see education as cooperative instead of competitive. Everything is so competitive nowadays, and we’re all encouraged to just look out for ourselves. I want students to see that a large group of people can work collectively toward the same goal,” says Yochim. “Most importantly, the students are envisioning and creating the project, spending time working with each other, and learning from both one another and the community.”

Three years ago, Yochim decided to bring her passion for exploring ethnography into her classroom. As a 2000 Allegheny graduate, Yochim based her senior project on ethnographic research, a qualitative method where researchers observe and interact with a study’s participants in their real-life environment. She returned to Allegheny to teach in 2008. Then in 2013, she collaborated with Professor River Branch on “Tool City Voices,” a media project that examined the up-and-down fortunes of the tool-and-die industry in the Meadville area.

That led to Yochim and her students interviewing Conneaut Lake residents and sharing that information with the former Eila V. Bush Endowed Professor of Art Amara Geffen, who crafted “Ganesh,” a sculpture installed at Fireman’s Beach in Conneaut Lake in 2016, culminating a community art project two years in the making.

Yochim has written two books based in ethnographic research. Her first, “Skate Life: Re-imagining White Masculinity,” explores how skateboarders negotiate their identities in skate culture. The second, “Mothering Through Precarity: Women’s Work and Digital Media,” co-authored with Associate Professor of Communication Arts Julie Wilson, is based on extensive ethnographic research conducted with mothers of young children in Meadville and Erie. Wilson also co-taught the Meadiaville class with Yochim during its second season. “My collaborations with Julie have been so important to both my research and teaching. She and I share teaching ideas all the time, and we’ve really developed this collaborative pedagogy together,” Yochim says.

Yochim has also worked closely with Oral History in the Liberal Arts (OHLA), a Great Lakes Colleges Association faculty development initiative supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Yochim is the communications and pedagogy director of OHLA, which encourages faculty to fold community-based oral history and narrative projects into the classroom.

“I really wanted to bring this to students, to encourage them to know their community better, to do something that mattered, and then to make their work public,” says Yochim. “OHLA was instrumental in helping me to imagine and build this project. It connected me with a network of liberal arts faculty who are doing similar work, and it helped me to develop the teaching know-how and the digital tools to bring the project to life.”

Project Work Led Graduate to Forge His Own Career

As a senior, Brogan McGowan was part of the Meadiaville project in the spring of 2016. Three years later, he finds himself employed as a private contractor working from Washington, D.C., and has juggled 18 consulting contracts with profit and nonprofit organizations since his graduation. His resume lists work titles from communication and marketing manager to creative strategy consultant to visual designer — all a strong representation for the versatility in skill set that ethnography in practice benefits a workplace.

“I learned from Professor Yochim and the Meadiaville experience to use communications as a tool to build relationships with people,” says McGowan.

His first contracting job out of college was with WQED-TV, Pittsburgh’s public broadcasting station, where he helped librarians develop and use short videos and podcasts as educational tools to bring children under the age of 5 and librarians together to document their lived experience learning together. This work concluded after three months, leading McGowan into a new direction in working with for-profit companies and organizations.

McGowan also has worked with the Allegheny County Health Department in Pittsburgh as a visual designer helping craft messaging and graphics to fight stigma surrounding folks battling addiction. His most recent consulting job, where Allegheny magazine reached him on the streets of San Francisco, is observing and helping design digital advertising and community engagement strategies for The Gender Confirmation Center, an organization that works to create high-quality gender-affirming medical care for trans and non-binary individuals.

“With almost all the contracts, I’ve developed the communications plan and worked to recruit and build a team of people that can take over the project. I believe finding more people to invest in the work creates a sustainable intention,” says McGowan. “There has been a lot of learning on the fly, and I’ve fallen a few times, but I’ve been learning from the whole experience. It’s unconventional but definitely incredible work. I’m being compensated for being a critical member of the community.

“Meadiaville gave me a voice for technical directions in these later projects,” McGowan says. “I learned project management, but more importantly how to meet people where they are in their lived experiences. I use it as a passageway to connect with people.”

Listening Is Important

The Meadiaville Listening Project results from work done in Yochim’s Communications Arts course called Media Consumption. Students prepare for their work by spending the first few weeks reading and discussing scholarship and theory about the current semester’s topic. The first two seasons of Meadiaville explored Meadville’s youth media makers and local community organizers. They also read work on doing ethnography and creating podcasts. To get up to speed on how to edit a podcast, Yochim turned to Allegheny communication arts alum Nick Ozorak ’13, who lives in Meadville and hosts “The Roundhouse Railroad” podcast. Ozorak generously developed a presentation on podcasting basics for the first semester of the class, and Yochim has drawn on his knowledge ever since.

Students then set the listening project theme for the semester, develop interview questions, contact potential interviewees, conduct the interviews, analyze the interviews and find common themes. They use all of this material to build a mini-series of podcasts about the theme, and they share these with the community. Students are encouraged to do timelines and profiles of the interviewees as well.

“The important thing is they are creating the course with other students, spending time with them and learning from them,” Yochim says. “Conducting long interviews is a great way for the students to get to know Meadville. Listening to community members forges important connections between the students and Meadville. They really begin to take ownership over the project and start to feel a true responsibility for the work they’re creating with the community.”

The students break into teams to handle different aspects of the project. “They start assigning themselves tasks because they are invested in the project,” Yochim says. “They can’t wait to share the final product. It’s really the students who become inspiring.”

Yochim’s class completed the project’s third season in the fall of 2018. Over the course of 14 weeks, Yochim and her students created a website, produced podcasts, created marketing materials, and published ethnographic analyses, all grounded in communication arts theory. It culminated with the release of “North Main Narratives,” an oral-history podcast that features the college’s recently retired staff and professors. The podcasts aired on WARC-FM, and the students planned and hosted a listening party in December in the Meadville Public Library.

Season Three explores the lives of Allegheny’s educators on campus and throughout the Meadville community. In a series of four podcasts, the season explores structural changes in higher education, employees’ personal experiences as educators, and the many interactions between the College and Meadville.

“Ethnography and oral history encourage students to listen deeply and carefully,” says Yochim. “So many folks retired after Allegheny’s retirement incentive last year, and so this year I wanted to give students the opportunity to learn from those retirees, to capture their voices, and to explore with them the unique lives on a liberal arts campus in a small town.”

What the Students Take Away

“Working on this project has been an amazing opportunity to work with and get to know more about these retired professors and faculty members, as well as what they do in and for the Meadville community,” says Emily Brady, a sophomore from Medford, Massachusetts. “Overall, this project has opened my eyes to the connections Allegheny has with the Meadville community, and vice versa.”

“My peers and I are certainly excited to have the opportunity to share the stories of those who gave many years to the college and have much to share in regard to their experiences,” says Alex Hasapis, a senior from Wooster, Ohio. “I think the community will be able to fully immerse themselves in these podcasts and come out with a rich perception of both Allegheny and Meadville.”

Visitors to the website can listen to the current season of the project and can visit anytime to find Seasons One and Two, which focused on Meadville’s youth media makers and community organizers, respectively.

Emily Hayhurst, a junior from La Crescenta, California, who was part of Meadiaville’s Season Two, says, “I think the project gives Allegheny students a unique opportunity to get to know the Meadville community while learning important skills such as interviewing, analyzing ethnographic research, and putting together a project for a public audience. I was especially excited to learn about the community because my mom grew up in Meadville and I used to come and visit every summer. I never knew a lot about the community then so I loved learning about all the awesome people and initiatives that are here.”

Senior Mark Myers has worked closely with the Meadiaville project for three years, working on its first season as a first-year student in the spring of 2016 and then as a teaching assistant for the last two seasons. “Since Meadiaville’s first rendition, the project and its breadth have grown exponentially, and I have had the opportunity to watch as different groups of students have expanded it, and pushed it,” says Myers. “I look forward to seeing how the project evolves moving forward, and have no doubt that it will continue to reach new highs, and continue to reflect the experiences of those within the Meadville and Allegheny communities.”

The Meadiaville Listening Project is made possible by the Meadville community, Oral History in the Liberal Arts, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Allegheny Department of Communication Arts and Theatre, and Allegheny College. More information on this project can be found at meadiaville.com.

Source: Academics, Publications & Research

Allegheny College junior Marisol Santa Cruz has been awarded a $4,000 Gilman International Scholarship in order to help defray the costs of her participation in an Experiential Learning Seminar trip to India in May 2019.

“After conducting extensive archival research in the summer of 2018 under the supervision of Professor Ishita Sinha Roy, I was on a mission to complete my goal of being able to study abroad,” says Santa Cruz, who is from Santa Ana, California.

Santa Cruz will be accompanying a group of students and faculty members to India from May 13 to June 3 to study India’s experiments with globalization across its 5,000-year history. As the group treks across the Indian subcontinent, the coursework will investigate how historical sites and narratives provide the “theatrical” backdrop to contemporary media events. They also will study and explore how heritage arts and crafts are being revived by global markets, while tribal villages are organizing their own forms of cultural survival. The course is titled “India: Restaging History as a Media Event.”

“As a Gilman scholar, I will conduct a follow-up service project that will help other students apply for study away programs and help them acquire the funding to participate in these opportunities,” says Santa Cruz, a communication arts major and computer science minor.

“My vision in life is to see more Mexican women, like myself, studying internationally as they take the initiative to open up opportunities for others,” Santa Cruz says. “Through the Experiential Learning Seminar experience, I’ll be transmitting my experiences back to the community through a research paper, presentation, a virtual journal and videos.”

Santa Cruz will bring diverse and fresh perspectives to the India learning experience, says Patrick Jackson, director of fellowship advising.

“Marisol’s application was really interesting because of all the diverse perspectives she’s trying to understand and incorporate with one another. She’s a Mexican-American woman thinking about India through the lens of the work she did last summer on historical women here in Meadville through the Crawford County Historical Society,” Jackson says. “I think with this kind of background, Marisol is liable to come home with all kinds of interesting things to say and with a lot of creative ideas that she might put into action in any number of ways. Her application was classic liberal arts: open-minded and ready to connect things that don’t immediately seem like they go together. I can’t wait to hear what she has to say when she comes back.”

The U.S. Department of State’s Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship is a grant program that enables students of limited financial means to study or intern abroad, thereby gaining skills critical to our national security and economic competitiveness. The program aims to encourage students to study and intern in a diverse array of countries and world regions. The program also encourages students to study languages, especially critical need languages (those deemed important to national security).

Source: Academics, Publications & Research

Allegheny’s Communication Arts and Theatre Department students will release the third season of the Meadiaville Listening Project, called “North Main Narratives,” an oral-history podcast that features the college’s recently retired staff and professors, with a listening party planned for Monday, Dec. 10, from 5 to 6:30 p.m. in the Meadville Public Library, 848 N. Main St. The event is free and open to the public.

Community members also can tune in to WARC 90.3-FM for a preview of the podcasts on December 6 from 6 to 8 p.m.

The Meadiaville Listening Project is a podcast series that illuminates everyday life in Meadville, focusing on how media thread through daily experience here. Season Three explores the lives of Allegheny’s educators on campus and throughout the Meadville community. “North Main Narratives” traces the changing contours of a liberal arts education, featuring the voices of recently retired professors and staff. In a series of four podcasts, the season explores structural changes in higher education, employees’ personal experiences as educators, and the many interactions between the college and Meadville.

Accompanying the podcasts is a website about Allegheny life, including explorations of its history and culture. An interview with President James H. Mullen, Jr., who is set to retire in June 2019, will be added to the site by mid-December.

The Meadiaville Listening Project is produced in its entirety by students in an ethnographic methods course in Allegheny’s Communication Arts and Theatre Department. Designed to teach students ethnographic and oral history methodologies, the course ultimately moves students to engage in deep conversations with community members and to spend time learning about the Meadville community. Through this experience, students not only explore their lives at Allegheny College and changes on campus, but also their lives in Meadville and before making the community their home.

“Ethnography and oral history encourage students to listen deeply and carefully,” said Emily Yochim, associate professor of Communication Arts. “So many folks retired after Allegheny’s retirement incentive last year, and so this year I wanted to give students the opportunity to learn from those retirees, to capture their voices, and to explore with them the unique lives on a liberal arts campus in a small town.”

Students have spent the semester researching the changing shape of higher education, and their interviews with professors and staff have shown them how those changes have impacted the Allegheny community.

“Working on this project has been an amazing opportunity to work with and get to know more about these retired professors and faculty members, as well as what they do in and for the Meadville Community,” said Emily Brady, a sophomore. “I was surprised to learn that even though many of the people we interviewed have retired many of them are still teaching classes and doing work for the school. Overall, this project has opened my eyes to the connections Allegheny has with the Meadville community, and vice versa.”

Visitors to the website can listen to the current season of the project beginning on December 10, but can visit anytime to find Seasons One and Two, which focused on Meadville’s youth media makers and community organizers, respectively. The website can be found at meadiaville.com.

“My peers and I are certainly excited to have the opportunity to share the stories of those who gave many years to the college and have much to share in regards to their experiences,” said Alex Hasapis, a senior. “I think the community will be able to fully immerse themselves in these podcasts and come out with a rich perception of both Allegheny and Meadville.”

The Dec. 10 kickoff event will offer listening booths featuring all three seasons of the project, children’s activities and light refreshments. Interested attendees will also be invited to participate in mini-interviews in the library’s new mediaLAB, which features a podcasting booth and green screen technologies.

About the Meadiaville Listening Project

The Meadiaville Listening Project is imagined and executed annually by Dr. Emily Yochim and students who enroll in her course Media Consumption. The class began with 18 students in January 2016 and has since expanded to create a new season each year with a new set of students and teaching assistants from seasons previous.

Over the course of 14 weeks, Yochim and her students conduct interviews, create a website, produce podcasts, create marketing materials, and publish ethnographic analyses, all grounded in communication arts theory. The Meadiaville Listening Project is made possible by the Meadville Community, Oral History in the Liberal Arts, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Department of Communication Arts and Theatre, and Allegheny College. More information on this project can be found at meadiaville.com.

Source: Academics, Publications & Research