Photo Credit: Lafe
Thanks to everyone for submitting their diaries from the June 4th diary day. If you kept one but have not sent it to us yet, please do. We expect to publish the diaries next week.
Keep your eye out for our summer directive prompt, coming soon to your inbox. We hope to collect those in July.
One of the arguments we’ve developed over the course of the EDLM project is that attentive reading of the diaries and directives we have collected provides glimpses of a distinctive “structure of feeling” in Muncie. (A “structure of feeling” is an idea first developed by literary scholar and cultural theorist Raymond Williams to describe a shared set of moods and emotions that circulate in everyday life in a particular time and place.) We see it in the stories people tell about Muncie and their place within it, comments on the landscape, and in accounts of day-to-day social interactions. A lot of this structure of feeling stems from the city’s postindustrial character and its history as a manufacturing center that now seeks to remake itself into something new. We lay out some of these ideas in a forthcoming publication, “Rust-Belt Feelings: Evidence from the Everyday Life in Middletown Project,” which will appear in the inaugural issue of Rust Belt Studies later this year. We will be back with more about this when our article is published.