Rust Belt Feelings | Rust Belt Studies

Rust Belt Feelings: Evidence from the Everyday Life in Middletown Project

James J. Connolly and Patrick Collier

Bios

James J. Connolly is Director of the Center for Middletown Studies and the George and Frances Ball Distinguished Professor of History at Ball State. His scholarship examines American urban life, cultural history, and politics since the late nineteenth century. His recent publications include Vulnerable Communities: Research, Policy, and Practice (2022) and What Middletown Read: Print Culture in an American Small City (2015). He is currently completing a co-authored book with Patrick Collier on everyday life in Muncie, Indiana.

Patrick Collier is the founder and co-director of the Everyday Life in Middletown project. He is the author of Modernism on Fleet Street (Ashgate 2006), Modern Print Artefacts: Textual Materiality and Literary Value in British Print Culture (Edinburgh UP 2016), and Teaching Literature in the Real World (Bloomsbury Academic 2018), along with many articles and chapters about British print culture.

Abstract

This article describes the post-industrial structure of feeling that pervades everyday life in Muncie, Indiana. It draws upon the archive of diaries and other materials assembled for the Everyday Life in Middletown project to document its presence and its variations. Employing Raymond Williams’ durable concept of the structure of feeling, we show how a pattern of emotion and sensibility grounded in an ambient narrative of past prosperity, decline, and hoped-for renewal informs the accounts of daily life and the resulting autobiographical selves that EDLM volunteers construct in their writing for the project. Our work suggests, in broad strokes, that post-industrial urban settings—particularly in the Midwest, where such narratives of decline are broadly accessible—generate a pattern of feeling that influences individual self-construction and self-understanding. We analyze how these dynamics play out in the EDLM archive, where volunteer writers frame their everyday thoughts, feelings, and activities within larger life stories that integrate, resist, or otherwise respond to the shared story of Muncie’s economic and social history. Awareness of the city’s history, day-to-day social interactions that foreground inequality and precarity, and the town’s post-industrial landscape all evoke this narrative and prompt many of our writers to factor the city into the autobiographical selves they construct, in fragmentary form, in their writing for the archive. More than simply the narrative of decline itself, the dynamics that arise when daily life summons it to mind constitute the local structure of feeling we describe here.

Keywords: Structure of feeling; Deindustrialization; Everyday life; Landscape; Material relations; Surface reading

Introduction: Ambivalent Feelings

Late in 2017, a civic leader in Muncie, Indiana, attended a dinner celebrating local business successes at the city's downtown convention center. There was an urgency to events of this sort in Muncie. Once a prosperous industrial center, the city had lost most of its manufacturing employment base by the early twenty-first century. Pervasive poverty, crumbling infrastructure, rising addiction rates and other problems now marked the place, making efforts for economic revival a central concern of local life. These circumstances, along with the event itself, prompted this civic leader to offer a short meditation on the city's trajectory, which he recorded in a diary entry. "This is a community beset by poverty," he wrote,

so the nonprofit community frequently hosts events to fundraise and tell the stories of how they are trying to help lift up Muncie. Muncie is a state of transition as the community is trying to redefine itself. Globalization and automation have eliminated many of the high paying blue-collar jobs that built this community. What does a town built on manufacturing do when there are fewer and fewer manufacturing jobs? Times are tough, so events like these not only provide hope but are also a gathering place for the middle–upper class individuals in Muncie to contribute what funds they have to good causes. I hope that by the time someone else is reading this that we’ve figured it out. I hope Muncie found a path forward in the wake of global economic change. I hope, I hope, I hope. (A14, Day 06)¹

This account of Muncie's past, present, and (hoped-for) future appears in the archive of Everyday Life in Middletown (EDLM), a humanities project designed to capture ordinary experience in this once-thriving, now-struggling postindustrial city. The project's name derives from Muncie's role as the subject of Robert and Helen Lynd's seminal community study, Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture, first published in 1929, and numerous follow-up investigations.² Since 2016, the EDLM team has solicited and shared periodic day diaries documenting ordinary life from just over one hundred volunteers recruited through public outreach that has included community events, social media, and contributions to the local press. Modeled in part after Mass Observation, the long-running British project that studies everyday life in the UK, EDLM invites volunteers to keep day diaries three times a year, on appointed days. The prompt for these submissions invites contributors to “tell us what you do during the day, and what you are thinking and feeling as you’re doing it.” Once a year, the project team invites the panel of writers to respond to "directives," which are modeled on questionnaires on a given topic or theme employed by Mass Observation.³ From February 2016, when volunteers submitted their first contributions, through February 2025, EDLM has collected more than 550 diaries and directives totaling close to 700,000 words. If the main motive for the project is to investigate contemporary Rust Belt life in collaboration with our volunteers, we, the editors of the EDLM project, also hope to create a historical record that in some respects mirrors the record of moods, habits, and outlooks created by the Lynds a century ago.

Connolly-Collier-Fig 1 - EDLM Landing Page.jpg

The Everyday Life in Middletown website, where users can select a link to the archives, the blog, the "Become a Diarist" page, and the "What is Everyday Life" page.

While EDLM aims in some respects to follow in the footsteps of Middletown, it also diverges from its methods. The Lynds, as well as their many successors, employed a classic anthropological approach that positioned community members as subjects to be observed by outside investigators. The ethos informing EDLM, inspired by Mass Observation, is more collaborative. It aims to cocreate a record of ordinary life with the project’s volunteer writers. These contributors submit their diaries, customarily by email, and the project team publishes them on the project website in anonymized fashion within a few weeks of receiving them. We have also invited contributors to provide feedback, post entries on our blog, and read and comment on each other’s diaries both on the project website and at public events, all in the interest of generating community around the project. EDLM’s project directors and many of its managing editors have contributed diaries in keeping with the project’s collaborative spirit. From the start, we have envisioned Everyday Life in Middletown as a creative project rather than a social science investigation and have encouraged our diarists to be inventive as they record their daily experiences. A number of them have embraced that approach, peppering their diaries with humor, verse, images, even sardonic footnotes addressing future readers. We have stressed creativity as a way to prompt our diarists to register the daily improvisations and imaginative acts of perception and communication that are inherent in everyday life.

While commitments to collaboration and creativity have shaped EDLM from its outset, the circumstances in which it took shape have also defined it. Beginning as an immersive learning class at Ball State University taught by Patrick Collier, it is now managed by staff from Ball State’s Center for Middletown Studies. It has evolved in ways that reflect the interests and agendas of the project’s leaders: Collier, a literature scholar, and James Connolly, a historian and Director of the Center. Its start date in early 2016 was the product of course scheduling and fortuitous timing, which has enabled the project to create a local record of the everyday amid a tumultuous decade in US history that has included political instability, a pandemic, and significant racial tensions. The focus on Muncie was partly a result of convenience—Ball State is located there—and partly an effort to capitalize on the city’s role as “Middletown.” As the project unfolded, it became clear that Muncie’s postindustrial character registered meaningfully in everyday life. And while no single community can typify the Rust Belt, the city’s history of job loss, economic revitalization efforts, and attempts to address social problems arising from these changes reflect broader regional developments and create an opportunity to consider their significance in the everyday.

The anonymous writer quoted in the opening of this article, whom we identify as Diarist A14, is aware of Muncie’s postindustrial character. He may also be conscious of EDLM’s goal of producing a documentary record. "By the time someone else is reading this," he writes—a phrase that makes clear that he is addressing future readers (as do many of EDLM's contributors, who are perhaps cued to do so by the conventions of diary writing that assume it to be a record for posterity). This imagined audience spurs A14 to construct a narrative that explains the city's current condition, one that is informed by history and that projects, however vaguely, into the future. Muncie has lost the industrial base upon which its prosperity once rested and is now struggling to create a new foundation for growth that will, hopefully, arrive at some point in the future. He even points to the mechanism propelling his narrative: broad forces—"globalization and automation"—have left the city in this condition.

There is also something less analytical and more emotive in A14's depiction of the city. The reference to poverty and the acknowledgment of the need for the middle and upper classes to contribute to "good causes" hints at an uneasiness about his privileged position amid the struggles of his neighbors, evidently made more palpable at a downtown gathering of the local elite attired in—as he notes—"suits, ties, and dresses." At the same time, a countervailing feeling that a more prosperous future is possible emerges, even if the "path forward" remains unclear. That uncertainty is emphasized in the passage's final incantation: "I hope, I hope, I hope."

A14's blend of hopefulness and doubt, rooted in a shared narrative that explains Muncie's present condition and the historical forces that have left it in such a deteriorated state, captures as well as any EDLM entry a pattern of feeling that courses through local daily life. A disquieting sense of uncertainty surrounding the city's future, which might just as easily bring greater decay as social and economic rebirth, follows from it. The city's social and physical environments offer cues that evoke these feelings. A14's professional status—his diaries are marked by references to his good fortune in comparison to others in the city—influences his presentation of local conditions in hopeful terms, including the allusions to a (presumably) bourgeois-led local rejuvenation. For others, however, the precise emotional valence tied to this framing differs. An awareness of the city's decline may feed doubt, despair, or cynicism, rather than can-do optimism. Often, these feelings coexist in the same person, as the oscillation between hope and worry in A14's first diary entry demonstrates.

In this essay, we show how a pattern of feeling grounded in this ambient narrative of past prosperity, subsequent decline, and hoped-for renewal informs the accounts of daily life and the resulting autobiographical selves that EDLM volunteers construct in their writing for the project. Our work suggests, in broad strokes, that postindustrial urban settings—particularly in the Midwest, where such narratives of decline are broadly accessible—generate a pattern of feeling that influences individual self-construction and self-understanding. We analyze how these dynamics play out in the EDLM archive, where volunteer writers frame their everyday thoughts, feelings, and activities within larger life stories that integrate, resist, or otherwise respond to the shared story of Muncie’s economic and social history. This positioning takes myriad forms—from a can-do self-assertion within the community of professionals and volunteers trying to turn the city around to an oppositional stance that sees Muncie as hostile to the writer’s plans, ambitions, or sense of self—and multiple points in between. As our reading of the archive shows, material aspects of ordinary life in the city evoke this narrative, influencing what writers choose to record and how they respond. Awareness of the city’s history, day-to-day social interactions that foreground inequality and precarity, and the town’s postindustrial landscape all evoke the ambient narrative and prompt many of our writers to factor the city into the autobiographical selves they construct, in fragmentary form, in their writing for the archive. More than simply the narrative of decline itself, the dynamics that arise when daily life summons it to mind constitute the local pattern of feeling we describe here.

Trees backlit by the sun through a window with ice crystals for a diary submission by Diarist A29. The caption reads, “My MUNCIES, by Lafe.”

On Method: An Archive of Cultural Feelings⁴

When we refer to a pattern of feeling, we draw upon a body of humanities scholarship stretching back at least to Raymond Williams's concept of a structure of feeling. Williams first employed this influential analytical approach to interpreting dramatic work—it initially appeared in a volume entitled A Preface to Film (1954)—but it evolved into a more comprehensive framework for explaining cultural history. Williams's larger ambition was to transcend the usual disciplinary sorting into analytical categories—society, politics, economics, culture—and capture complex, overarching patterns of experience that characterize a time and place, a sense of culture as “a whole way of life.”⁵ For Williams, a structure of feeling does not generate universally shared emotions but rather fosters particular sets of feelings while discouraging others.

Ben Highmore employs the term "cultural feelings" in his effort to develop and demonstrate analytical approaches to Williams's concept. As he explains, a structure of feeling does not determine an individual’s response to any specific condition (it does not compel someone to embrace a local narrative) so much as it sets the terms within which variations on the theme can occur. "'Structures of feeling,'" he writes, "is a phrase that points at one and the same time to an overarching orchestration of energies, attitudes, and emotions, and to the fact that 'we' may experience this orchestration differently depending on our background and current situation." Put another way, Highmore adds, "groups of people can feel a structure of feeling quite differently...and yet the overarching aspect of a structure of feeling is what articulates this difference."⁶ In this sense the narrative of Muncie as a down-on-its-luck Rust Belt town and/or one that is rebounding from such a decline does not determine any individual’s understanding of the town and its place in their lives, but constitutes the parameters (the "overarching orchestration") within which individual responses take form.⁷

A number of scholars have drawn upon Williams’s idea of a structure of feeling to explain the experience of deindustrialization. Tim Strangleman notes that in Marxism and Literature (1977) Williams distinguished between three categories of structure of feeling: dominant, residual, and emergent. Of these, Strangleman singles out the residual form, in which inherited meanings and values that formed in older social and economic contexts persist even though they no longer dominate, as especially relevant for understanding the experience of postindustrial communities. In these settings, the tension between this residual structure of feeling and the dominant (hegemonic, neoliberal) form characterizes moods and outlooks.⁸ Strangleman's analysis draws upon Sherry Lee Linkon's concept of the "half-life of deindustrialization," which argues that local values, perceptions, and identities draw upon communal histories of industrial production long after manufacturing has ceased to be a community's primary economic foundation. They continue to frame cultural feelings even for those a generation removed from shop-floor work, creating a liminal experience in which residents of Rust Belt places find themselves caught between an industrial past and an uncertain future.⁹ While Strangleman and Linkon are especially concerned with the ways that members of the working class employ residual structures of feeling to frame communal experiences of loss and change, the cultural feelings evoked by deindustrialization can inform the perspectives and identities of members of many social groups living in these places.¹⁰

Landscape is by no means the least powerful or present element of a local structure of feeling, particularly in a community literally marked by corporate abandonment. Cultural feelings, Highmore writes, “are not just attached to historical moments…; they can also congregate around certain sites and spaces, around particular landscapes."¹¹ As scholars of deindustrialization emphasize, the physical embodiments of deindustrialization, such as empty lots, abandoned plants, rutted streets, and dilapidated housing, provide reminders of a city's plight.¹² In Muncie, as in other postindustrial places, the fleeting but often repetitive thoughts and feelings that brownfields and other such spaces help create are locally situated and determined, but they also take place in relation to an “image repertoire,” a set of more widely circulating, mediated images of Rust Belt decline and “ruin porn.”¹³ Such feelings are complex and varied—these images may provoke wistfulness or fatigue or despair, but they can also evoke sentimental associations or serve as motivators for civic activists and organizers, or a combination of these. The landscape works in tandem with history, narrative, and the material relations that they express and embody to form the matrix in which some everyday moods and affects arise. Cultural feelings thus recur across people and time and are apt to be picked up and circulated both within and beyond specific communities.

The approach to a traffic roundabout with a sign for Muncie on a snowy day, a submission from Diarist A29. Credit "Lafe."

If Highmore’s lens for studying cultural feelings is primarily national (the United Kingdom), the specific geographic focus of Everyday Life in Middletown offers an opportunity to witness the functioning of cultural feelings with a particular local inflection. The EDLM archive has created an expressive space where its volunteers can rehearse cultural feelings and where the constituent affective nodes of history, landscape, and material relations come into view. By mobilizing the word “Middletown,” with its insistence on a long-documented local culture, and foregrounding the genre of the daily diary, whose form carries cultural conventions of documentary and self-revelation, and then specifically prompting its writers to “Tell us what you do during the day, and what you are thinking and feeling as you’re doing it,” EDLM has created a platform for the expression of cultural feelings, and its archive registers them in their place-specific articulations. It is well positioned to describe a distinctive structure of feeling in a Rust Belt community and to illustrate the interplay of historical narrative, postindustrial imagery, and spatially influenced social interactions that gives it daily resonance in such settings.

In adopting this framework, EDLM purposefully takes an arts-and-humanities approach to understanding Rust Belt life. Our archive is not a random sample from which we seek to generalize in the manner of empirical social science. The process we have used to recruit diarists is more opportunistic than systematic, relying on various forms of public outreach and networking to attract volunteers. While we have assembled a diverse panel of contributors and have taken specific steps to generate participation among the city’s Blacks and working class residents, our most faithful volunteers are largely college educated and disproportionately female. EDLM is better understood as a collaborative creative project that provides an imaginative outlet for its participants. By prompting our writers to pay heed to the activities and affects of daily living, we are not only registering such creativity but encouraging it, bringing it to consciousness. Taking our cue from Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, and others, we do not attempt to make generalized, empirical claims, but instead read examples from our archive that inspire and illustrate theoretical insights.¹⁴

While we are tempted to describe our method for examining EDLM writing as “close reading,” recent debates over methods in literary theory circles enjoin us to say a bit more. Our readings are not, in a large majority of cases, “close” in the sense that they seek to unveil tensions, contradictions, or depths not visible on the “surface” of the texts, or which their writers are unaware of or unwilling to disclose. They are, however, analytical in the sense that they distill and articulate the meanings their writers construct or (sometimes) imply; that they identify patterns within individual writers’ contributions across time and across the archive as a whole; and that they place these meanings in historical and local contexts—both those present in the “primary text” of the archive itself and those that we bring as scholars studying everyday life and US history. In this sense our method is close to the “surface reading” articulated by Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus and championed by Toril Moi, a “practice of critical description” attuned to patterns of significance and narrative structures, curious about how people describe their lives in specific ways and how their creative choices speak to the issues that interest us as academic critics and members of the Muncie community.¹⁵

We treat the accounts of EDLM writers (and ourselves, as EDLM contributors) not as “representative” of the community or the historical present, nor as examples of abstract patterns, but as “telling cases,” in Dorothy Sheridan’s terminology. Telling cases do not prop up “empirical generalizations” but may “reveal principles” that make larger dynamics visible—“theoretically valid connections between events and phenomena” that are only visible through the reading methods of “describing, interpreting, and explaining.”¹⁶ More crucially, Muncie itself is a “telling case” in this sense, whose textual representation in the archive can be explored for theoretical, provisional insights into how historical dynamics play out in everyday life in the Rust Belt, and how locality inflects these processes. As “Middletown,” Muncie has a long history of being posited as typical or representative, but we would suggest that the writers we quote in this essay are, to quote James Hinton, “representative only in the radically non-statistical sense that, as exceptionally self-reflective people, they can provide us with access to a cultural world that others inhabited with less self-awareness.”¹⁷

Highmore, Sheridan, and Moi all lean into “description” as a valid, active critical practice (usually more active than paraphrase, though paraphrase is one of its tools). Description is creative, too, if we hold with Raymond Williams’s credo from The Long Revolution, where the “structure of feeling” took on one of its fullest articulations. There, Williams declares that the kinds of creative description usually associated with artists are, in fact, part-and-parcel of our process of making our way through the world. Any new encounter or new experience provokes an internal process of description, and no experience is known, nor can it be communicated, until it has been described. “This vital descriptive effort, which is not merely a subsequent effort to describe something known, but literally a way of seeing new things and new relationships—has often been observed, by artists, yet it is not the activity of artists alone,” he argues. “The same effort is made, not only by scientists and thinkers, but also, and necessarily, by everyone.” Thus for Williams “there are, essentially, no ordinary activities, if by ‘ordinary’ we mean the absence of creative interpretation and effort.” “The artist,” he asserts, “shares with other men what is usually called ‘the creative imagination,’ that is to say, the capacity to find and organize new descriptions of experience.”¹⁸

A number of scholars, including most notably Rita Felski, Lauren Berlant, and Kathleen Stewart, have followed Williams in making the case for investigating everyday life as an arena of creativity where we can find patterns of meaning-making that are both shared and intimate.¹⁹ Berlant has argued that daily life itself, like storytelling, takes the form of genres, patterns of expectation that play out in our interactions with others, our hopes for the future, and our self-understanding.²⁰ Stewart, in Ordinary Affects, seeks to identify "public feelings that begin and end in broad circulation, but [are] also the stuff that seemingly intimate lives are made of."²¹ Part of our aim is to use critical methods of humanistic scholarship to explore the patterns these and other scholars have identified. In what follows, we bring the premises and critical perspectives we have discussed in this section to a set of rich examples from the EDLM archive. There we find meaning-making, self-definition, and everyday creativity taking place in complex and varied responses to a Rust Belt narrative of decline.

On Muncie: EDLM’s First Directive

In early 2019, EDLM's organizers asked our volunteers to do something different. Instead of compiling a diary of a single day, as we had over the previous three years, we asked them to consider and share thoughts and feelings about Muncie and its future.²² The responses ranged widely, from gloomy and critical to satisfied and hopeful. More than a few were middling or mixed, acknowledging deep problems but expressing some optimism about the community's future. Regardless of whether expressing positive or negative feelings, EDLM writers most often organized their responses around a narrative of economic decline, social decay, and, for the more positive among them, hoped-for improvement. As our prompt called explicitly for opinions about Muncie and speculation about its future, it is not surprising that contributors framed their discussions as a referendum on the state of the city. Their responses largely defaulted to the narrative of deindustrialization and its consequences that undergirds the local structure of feeling.

Diarist A02's response articulated a pattern that emerged in many of the responses, as well as across the EDLM archive as a whole. Near the end of his response, he writes:

[A]s I look back on what I’ve written thus far, I see that each positive point drifts toward criticism or complaint. That’s a pretty good summation of how I think and feel. I think Muncie is an okay place—at least for someone in my position—but I don’t necessarily feel Muncie is doing well. It’s not so much a matter of weighing pros and cons. I can counterbalance every hopeful development—a perked-up downtown with some good restaurants and bars, a solid, fairly successful university, or impressive, socially beneficial nonprofit work—with a downer—ongoing political corruption, struggling schools, and stubbornly persistent poverty. I’m fortunate enough to be in a position to benefit from and support the good things without suffering much personally from the problems. But the negatives are a drag on our sense of the place, a constant reminder of the city’s downward trajectory. It remains difficult to imagine Muncie as a broadly prosperous, successful community. (A02, Directive 1, emphases in original)

For A02, a looser, less analytical sense of place, informed by an overarching narrative and prompted in part by social and physical conditions, defines his feelings about his hometown. For him, they trump a more detached accounting of the city's condition.

Handwritten diary and transcription submitted by Diarist A37.

Almost reflexively, he also acknowledges the ways in which his social position is entangled with his assessment. These elements—a prevailing narrative, a variety of cues from social interactions and the built environment, and the recognition of social differences—combine to create the structure of feeling that frames everyday life in Muncie for many EDLM contributors.

In describing the city’s condition, several diarists express a strong sense of disdain. One, who emphatically rejects the idea that he could remain in Muncie for the long term, puts it bluntly: "I don’t think Muncie is quite done burning down, and it needs to finish that process," he wrote (A23, Directive 1). Another, Diarist D50, a retired chef, offers an especially bleak depiction. A transplant who had moved to Muncie from another postindustrial place several years earlier, he begins by recalling his first impressions upon arriving, most of them triggered by the physical and social environment he encountered on a walk across town:

What I saw frankly appalled me. Blight. An alarming number of abandoned houses, with a few kept-up homes scattered in between trying fervidly to pretend everything was normal. Rental houses that no one but students or the desperately poor would want to live in. A mansion on Washington Street that had partially burned around its chimney stacks—which stood naked, jutting against the sky, while the elegantly appointed lower floors gaped open to the elements. Potholes and more potholes, and the neglected remnants of traffic lines painted on the streets some long time before. A downtown that felt eerily depopulated.

Further on, he observes what he feels are an excessive number of police ""trawling around, looking for trouble" and a "huddle of grizzled homeless men" outside a food pantry. "I did not want to live here," he concludes. "The city repelled me. It made me feel despondent, desolate" (D50, Directive 1, italics in original). The intervening years in the city, he adds, had not changed his mind.

Muncie’s poor reputation did not compel alienated responses from all of our contributors, however. The sense of Muncie as a recovering place fed feelings of satisfaction for some. “I leave when I die,” Diarist E55, a retired teacher, declares. “If Muncie hadn’t transformed it is doubtful I could have remained: diverse, eclectic, culturally dynamic, testing progressive. All such descriptors are meaningful for feeling home to a lightly colored, lesbian Jewess” (Directive 1). Diarist E54, a small business owner, declares, “When I first moved to Muncie, I got this vibe that people were disappointed with this space,” phrasing that employs the cotemporary term “vibe” to evoke an ill-defined yet broadly recognized emotional current running through the city. Mobilizing another vague term for a shared sensibility, she then insists, “Muncie gets a bad rap, but, to me, it’s a hidden gem—nestled away—not easily accessible from i69 (sic). I really like Muncie. I always have” (Directive 1).

For others, a narrative of decline provides the backdrop for self-portrayals as optimistic, can-do citizens participating in a communal turnaround. Diarist A28, a nonprofit executive, writes, “I visit all sorts of places and talk with all sorts of people…. There is so much generosity and compassion in our community. So many people behind the scenes working to improve lives.” Later in the same essay, she insists, "There is plenty of work to be done…that IS being done….We’ve come a long way, and have a long way to go, but things are happening!" (A28, Directive 1; italics in original). In a variation on this theme, Diarist A34, an emphatically conservative factory worker, insists that "if we can get a few truly motivated individuals to step up and help change our city for the better, we can have a great swing back. After all, we still have a great number of skilled laborers and otherwise motivated citizens” (A34, Directive 1). Both A28 and A34 make clear in their directive responses that they number themselves among those working to revive Muncie. These and other personal narratives, often constructed across numerous EDLM contributions, all share a touchstone narrative about deindustrialization and its discontents.

For all the variation evident in responses to the directive about Muncie, both the celebratory and the disdainful anchored their feelings in the prevailing narrative about of Muncie as a postindustrial city. Certain elements of that narrative repeated insistently: a recognition that city was once more prosperous, is now in poor shape physically and socially, remains divided economically and geographically, and has an uncertain future. A range of everyday feelings emerged in relation to this framework, which provides a defining element of life in a Rust Belt city such as Muncie.

A Structure of Feeling in the Everyday

If our directive about Muncie purposefully elicited feelings about the city's present condition and future prospects, the hundreds of day diaries that make up the majority of the EDLM archive offer more subtle evidence of the local structure of feeling. The atmosphere created by Muncie’s postindustrial character more often lurks in the background of responses to our standard prompt ("write what you do, and what you think and feel as you are doing it"), which does not spur people to directly consider locale. Most of our diarists only infrequently reference place, which is arguably a reflection of the devaluation of the local in contemporary media and public life. Nevertheless, there is enough commentary about Muncie, its physical environment, and its social character in our archive to detect a postindustrial structure of feeling that infuses ordinary experience.

Downtown Muncie, Indiana, on a sunny day.

The emotions diarists express vary. They include unease, guilt, and defensiveness, as well as contentment, pride, and optimism. Quite often, as in the case of Diarist A14’s account of the downtown civic event that opens this essay, diarists record a mix of these feelings as they recount their daily lives.

Most obviously, this structure of feeling is apparent in the occasional explicit reference to the city's deterioration in relation to various aspects of daily life. A retiree who returned to Muncie after pursuing a career that took him elsewhere, ties his and his wife's health to the city's decline:

When we left Muncie in 1974, it was a pretty robust city, but every city we have lived in since 1974, until our return in 2017, has been larger than Muncie. One obvious difference we noticed is that in the other cities our Primary Care Physician and Medical Specialists were in, or near, the same town where we lived, which was awesome. Now, our PCP is in Muncie, but, (sic) we usually make the drive to Indy for specialists. (G58, Day 12)

Others find themselves debating the pros and cons of living in a postindustrial town with friends and neighbors. Recounting one such conversation, A07 reports: "We talk about all sorts of things in relation to Muncie: volunteer opportunities, finding community, housing, the good, the bad, the ugly" (A07, Day 15). Diarist I69, an academic with an activist bent, takes stock of her recent conversations about the city, concluding "Muncie is said to be rich in resources but poor in systems and I have found it to be true" (I69, Day 22). Diarist D50 spends a portion of one diary considering redevelopment ideas and whether they will work in "low wage Muncie" (D50, Day 17).

At times our diarists illustrate how social and environmental cues remind people of the city's troubles, prompting expressions of dissatisfaction. While sitting in his car going through a car wash, one diarist sees a social media post that presents a "bath of images of abandoned buildings and homes" in Muncie. It's captioned "Someone should make a horror film here" (A23, Day 17). Another, stuck in traffic beneath a railroad bridge, looks up and notices "all the cracks in the cement and hope[s] that a train doesn't come while I'm stuck under there. Muncie and trains—seriously" (C47, Day 11). (Muncie is crisscrossed by train tracks, a legacy of its industrial past and a source of much local discussion because they lead to traffic delays when long freight trains proceed slowly, or not at all, through the city.) "Muncie stinks of rotting garbage in the heat," one of our more acerbic contributors announces amid a heatwave (D50, Day 09). Diarist I69, reflecting on her engagement with local parks, declares:

Based on the parks presently, Muncie does not feel like a thriving city. I take my kid to the parks, and run or bike by them, but rarely attend events in them. There is not much going on in the parks. Someone recently told us that Muncie is about 30 years behind other cities when it comes to its parks. (I69, Day 17)

The atmospheric element in I69’s observation of the lifelessness she sees in the local parks is telling. She presents it as a feeling, a lamentation about the city’s poor socioeconomic condition, rather than as a point about policy choices. It is followed by a vague reference to an earlier exchange—“someone recently told us”— about the city’s backwardness, further suggesting the manner in which assessments of the city are woven into the everyday, in conversation and in the landscape.

Perhaps the most frequent form of acknowledgment of the city's predicament comes in references to inequality and the unease it arouses. Muncie is far from unique in experiencing significant inequality, but the city's plight, and perhaps its comparatively small geographic scale, may make local poverty a more salient element of everyday experience. In another example of environmental cues that remind locals of the state of the city, Diarist D50 irritably links one of the more mundane aspects of life, a change in the weather, with the city's socioeconomic divide:

[T]he season is once again upon us when half of Muncie constantly drives around in beat-up pickup trucks bearing lawnmowers in the bed, mowing the lawns of the other half of Muncie. The carbureted thrum of these lawnmowers is nearly constant, along with the higher-pitched whine of weed-trimmers and leaf-blowers, making concentration difficult. (D50, Day 14)

During a Saturday morning trip to the grocery store for pancake ingredients and other supplies, Diarist A21 and his wife ruminate about opening a grocery store in the city's poorer section. "Not just a grocery store," they decide,

but a co-op where people could trade work for food. For example, can’t pay for things? Spend a day working it off in the store. Also, we would allow people to run a tab because I sincerely believe that the vast majority would pay us back if given the opportunity. And while we’re at it, part of the benefits package would include assistance for students in both high school and higher education. The store would be all about valuing people and honoring their inherent worth and dignity. I see it as an investment in our future. Perhaps it would be close to the south side, Whitely area, and the Cardinal Greenway, somewhere in that area. (A21, Day 07)

The spatial references make clear that the diarist is focused on poorer sections of town. They underscore the ambient narrative of postindustrial decay that provides a context for musings that pull together sociogeographic imagination, an awareness of one's social position, and self-construction as an optimistic, socially conscious citizen.

Awareness of local poverty also generates a mild sense of guilt for some middle class residents. A transplant from San Francisco who still worked remotely for a company located there noted how much cheaper life is in Muncie (one of the positive facets of life in a postindustrial city, as noted below). "In Muncie, I feel loaded," she asserts, despite making a minimum salary by Bay Area standards, implicitly registering the city's poverty as context for her own situation. A23 picks up Uber shifts to save money for a home purchase, but notes that his husband "feels bad that I feel the need to make extra money, when I am earning about triple the average annual income for an individual in Muncie" (Day 10). Diarist A14 reports that his family pays $500 a month for part-time daycare, a figure is "probably what most people pay for a mortgage in Muncie in 2017." Later in the same passage he concedes their good fortune: "My family is lucky enough to be able to pay these fees. I'm not sure how less fortunate families do it" (A14, Day 06).

Not every diary entry expresses negativity or unease about Muncie. Some cite the city's modest scale and the sociability that it enables as a positive. Two different diarists recount serendipitous encounters with friends at Savage's Ale House, a downtown restaurant. "Great to see all of them," one declares, "and I appreciated the fact that this is something that happens on a frequent basis to us in Muncie as lifelong residents" (A26, Day 03). In other cases, personal circumstances make Muncie attractive or produce a sense of belonging. "I want roots. I want to stay in Muncie," a grad student declared in the midst of expressing her hope that she won't "have to slink back to my hometown with my tail between my legs, living in my parent's unfinished basement" (G60, Day 15). When a pair of old friends arrive back in town, "Muncie feels like home" says Diarist J71 (Day 17). A low cost of living is another plus for many EDLM writers. Expressing a common theme, transplant G59 is pleased to be able to buy a home in the city and have "money left over." The result is a sense of peace because "a past rollercoaster ride of life …has rolled me to a gentle landing here in Muncie" (Day 12).

Local circumstances make it easy to read positive comments about Muncie as defensive. In some instances, that defensiveness is unspoken, but often it becomes explicit. In a late-night Facebook post, Diarist F56 (a retired office worker) responds to a friend ("a Muncie expat") who has criticized the city, invoking "all the good things still happening here.” These include "community involvement, new construction, campus growth (building and enrollment) food/clothing banks, biking lanes/beautification, etc." Yet even positive pronouncements are leavened by acknowledgement of "the bad stuff," much of which she attributes to widespread addiction, which is, she adds in another defensive note, "a plague in affluent communities as well as not as affluent.” This exchange spurs her to further reflection on the city. She reports having stopped following a local Facebook page dedicated to historical photos and memorabilia because of its pervasive nostalgia, "the repetitive lament about Muncie not being the same as it was 25–50 years ago.” "Few places are!" she replies, adding, "I’ve visited and lived other places; there’s no place like home” (F56, Day 11).

That sense of connection, rooted in family life and place-based loyalty, prompts her to defend the city and work to solve its problems. "Muncie is home. I’ve chosen to stay and help those who strive to improve it, not become someone who abandons my hometown and whines publicly about its deterioration. I reared three children here who are successful adults. One lives in Muncie, one in Indianapolis, one in Europe.” She closes by blending history and personal experience to explain her attachment:

In the bleakest winters, I’ve wondered why my Westward-bound ancestors stopped here. Why didn’t they go for the gold—not nuggets but sunshine?! Then I realize, someone put down roots in the farm-friendly Midwest, and it was probably family ties that held my direct ancestors here. Now I understand that better. (F56, Day 11)

As in the responses to the directive about Muncie, EDLM contributors often use assessments of Muncie's difficulties as the reason to celebrate efforts to lift the city up, including their own. Mulling over time spent away from the city due to family circumstances, Diarist I69 notes, "There are many things to love and miss about Muncie: my house, our friends, my office, and especially the sense of community. I know many good people working hard to make Muncie better and they inspire me to do more" (I69, Day 13). Reflecting on his participation in "several recent community service projects," Diarist C45 notes the large number of enthusiastic participants. He reports having "long felt the Muncie community is a generous one, willing to give of time and money to assist or otherwise lift others, a virtuous offering in the best of times, but of great importance when so many are still struggling." He goes on to express pride in the work of local nonprofits that "have stepped in and tried to fill the void of the robust charities and services which seemed to exist here when the factories and unions were a-humming, or so I am told" (C45, Day 20). For these and other like-minded Munsonians, the chance to combat the difficulties created by deindustrialization generates feelings of belonging and satisfaction.

Even for some positively disposed diarists, experiences that highlight social pathologies feed a range of feelings. Diarist A28 positions herself in the ranks of the improvers, recording an account of her interaction with an intoxicated man in her near-downtown neighborhood that illustrates how a complex of emotions can operate within a localized structure of feeling. Upon encountering the man, she alerts nearby police officers. Afterward, she reports having "just a little guilt that the guy may have simply had a horrible day and just drank a little more than he should have. I may have helped escalate his problems." From there she offers a reflection on living in an area of town where these sorts of encounters are not uncommon. She describes her neighborhood as "a wonderful, weird, beautiful place and at the same time troubled and blighted. It’s not that I would call [it] dangerous by any means, but we do have many, many residents who have addiction problems. Others who don’t possess the type of tolerance and fortitude to live in a historic urban neighborhood would not understand" (A28, Day 6). Here, the city's social troubles, manifested in a street encounter, summon up feelings of fear, guilt, and pride, with the latter allowing her to distinguish herself from her less open, tolerant neighbors.

The disquiet evident in A28's mix of reactions to a street encounter can also manifest in social interactions, particularly when those with a commitment to improving the city engage with those who dwell more on its problems. One day in early 2017, Diarist B37 spends time mulling an exchange from the previous day with a pair of friends:

Thought about my answers yesterday to S. and S. and how I probably came off as not as open as I could be about trying to like Muncie. I thought that I wished I had said that my essential issue is that I don’t feel like I belong to this area, geographically speaking, and that that’s really true of all places. (B37, Day 02)

In another instance, Diarist A25, a bank officer, recounts a pleasant, serendipitous dinner with a pair of friends who happened to arrive at a local pub when they did. One of the two disliked Muncie and wanted to leave, which led to a conversation about local civic apathy and how that quality played a role in convincing A25's daughter, a recent college grad, to move elsewhere (A25, Day 13). Such exchanges reflect the ways local residents regularly navigate the tensions tied to living in Muncie, which influence and intermingle with daily interactions as well as decisions about an individual's life course.

The impulse to defend Muncie, or debate its character, sometimes directly prompted, sometimes not, also arises out of the recognition that EDLM entries are meant in part to be records for posterity and can be used to counter (or reinforce) the prevailing narrative of Rust Belt decay that seems to define the city. One such vindication, offered by Diarist A20, a retired member of the local managerial class, provides a particularly extensive example of this framing. After a detailed, bullet-pointed account of a remarkably active day that includes a family party, some physically taxing volunteer work, and a community dinner, he closes his diary with an emphatic defense of the city that rejects the narrative of local decline. He seems spurred to do so by his sense of EDLM as both a venue for defining the community in the present and as a contribution to the historical record, expressing gratitude for the opportunity to "file our remembrances and our celebrations and frustrations for all to see." The passage is worth unpacking in some detail because it captures one way that a narrative of decline circulating in Muncie can frame a complicated array of feelings.

A published diary submission from Diarist J89, Day 23.

The final section of this day diary begins on a celebratory, even patriotic note. "But all in all, we are blessed to live in Muncie, and to be a part of Ball State and Rotary and the Washington Street Bridge Dinner and all the other events and things that make Muncie a very special place," he writes. Nevertheless, qualifications follow quickly. "It’s really better than it looks from the outside," A20 insists, artfully positioning the city's unnamed critics as outsiders, whose negativity places them beyond the community even if they reside within its bounds. A recognition of Muncie's special qualities, he contends, arises "if you get involved with what’s going on in the inside, and take the time to invest some of our time and energy in celebrating being in this American experiment with lots of others who are also trying to make the best of a reasonably good situation.”

But the need for Rust Belt apologetics seems unavoidable, even—or perhaps especially—for fervent local patriots. A20 confesses that "no place is perfect." Nevertheless, he cites his experience in other places—"I’ve moved 31 times in my lifetime, and lived in 11 different communities in Indiana, Illinois, Ontario, Canada, Kentucky, and Indiana again"—to argue that "this place is pretty darn good.” He is "proud to be from Delaware County and Indiana, and from the Muncie Community, and I like the fact that I can call it home without apologizing."

This oblique acknowledgment of a pressure to defend Muncie persists in the entry's final declamation:

We have signature elements that are known far and wide, and for which we need not apologize, nor do we need to gloat. But we do have pride in them, and knowledge that we are capable of competing on the world stage in many ways, and of contributing to the strong fabric of America. And of this, we are very proud and humble, to be called Americans, Hoosiers, and Munsonians. God has blessed us real good in all of that. And we still have much to do. So it’s not like we can rest on our laurels. But we can be satisfied that we are doing our best, and that we have others working beside us, shoulder to shoulder, to make this a better place next year than it is this year. And for that and for the Good Lord’s blessings, we give many thanks. (A20, Day 08)

It is notable that A20 does not explicitly mention the poverty and blight that features so prominently in accounts of local daily life provided by other diarists. It is present nevertheless, in his acknowledgment of the need to "make this a better place next year than it is this year," in his rejection of "outsider" critiques, and more broadly in his unprompted need to defend Muncie. The city's troubles, and the disparagement that follows from it, are the background context that A20 is responding to, even if he never cites them specifically. For him, that ambient narrative of postindustrial decay forms the frame within which he constructs his self-portrait as a civic patriot motivated by a range of feelings, including life satisfaction, gratitude, local pride, defensiveness, patriotism, and religious faith. This specific blend of emotions and beliefs is distinctive to A20, but the structure of feeling within which it resides, and which gives it coherence, is shared by many of his fellow citizens.

Conclusion

If we were to solicit day diaries in another, differently situated community—a cosmopolitan urban neighborhood, a prosperous suburb, or a rural settlement—we would encounter different structures of feeling. The background narrative, the visual and social cues that operate in the everyday, and the community's material relations would create a different "social weather," to borrow Ben Highmore's term.²³ In the EDLM archive, elements of the physical landscape, shared historical memory, and social interactions evoke local economic decline and social decay; these concepts in turn frame the local details diarists select and what they say about them. This dynamic provokes some writers, in more extended, autobiographical moments, to critique the city, condemn it, pray for it, celebrate those who try to make it better. Their textual meaning-making registers these elements of the social weather and hints at similar atmospheric conditions in similarly situated cities.

Of course there are limits to our approach. A panel of one hundred people, shifting in makeup and contributing only periodically over nine years, can only capture so much of the myriad feelings in a community of more than 65,000 people. Diaries themselves, which privilege writing as a form of expression and are selectively constructed, are a limited means of capturing experience. The pattern of feeling we find in Muncie is also to some extent locally specific; a similar project would uncover other, equally distinct patterns in postindustrial places such as Gary, Youngstown, Flint, or Detroit, all of which have different histories, landscapes, and social characters. Muncie's role as Middletown, and this project's evocation of that label, no doubt conditions our contributors to emphasize local conditions differently, and perhaps more analytically, than residents of another community would.

Despite these caveats, the structure of feeling we detect in Muncie through careful reading of our archive makes clear the salience of deindustrialization in everyday consciousness. It reveals some of the ways that people observe and understand their daily lives and integrate them into their unfolding sense of a continuous, evolving self, existing in a specific place and historical moment. Attention to this process helps us grasp this defining pattern in Rust Belt life, a pattern framing the ways in which people continuously imagine their futures, whether in harmony with, resistance to, or disdain for the future of their community, or with a mixture of these and other feelings.

Footnotes

¹ All of the diaries and directive responses cited in this article can be found in the archive of Everyday Life in Middletown (https://bsudsl.org/edlmiddletown/, accessed March 24, 2025). Each citation references the volunteer’s number and the day on which they recorded that diary or directive.

² The publication of Robert S. and Helen Merrell Lynd’s Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1929) established Muncie as a site for research on American social and cultural trends. The success of the Lynds’ initial investigation prompted them to return to Muncie a decade later and produce a second book about the city (Lynd and Lynd, Middletown in Transition: A Study in Cultural Conflicts, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1937). Over the past century, dozens of scholars have followed in the Lynds' footsteps, examining topics ranging from political behavior to linguistic patterns in this small eastern Indiana city and making it among the most closely studied communities in the United States. The Lynds work has received sharp criticism for its neglect of racial and ethnic minorities and subsequent scholarship has sought to broaden its focus. See, for example, Luke Eric Lassiter et. al., The Other Side of Middletown: Exploring Muncie’s African-America Community (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2004). While some researchers have argued that Muncie is in some sense typical of a broader range of American communities, that claim has always been contested.

³ The EDLM project team includes its codirectors (two Ball State University faculty members who are the authors of this essay), several successive graduate student managing editors, and undergraduate student researchers.

⁴ This subtitle highlights Ben Highmore’s Cultural Feelings: Mood, Mediation, and Cultural Politics (London: Taylor and Francis, 2017) and Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003), both of which have informed our methods in this project.

⁵ Raymond Williams and Michael Orrom, A Preface to Film (London, Film Drama, 1954), 22–23; Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (London: Chatto and Windus, 1961); Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), Williams, Culture and Society 1780–1950 (New York: Anchor Books, 1960).

⁶ Ben Highmore, Cultural Feelings, 24.

⁷ Highmore also contends that these patterns can develop on many scales. They can "animate a room or saturate an epoch" (Cultural Feelings, 15).

⁸ Tim Strangleman, "Deindustrialisation and the Historical Sociological Imagination: Making Sense of Work and Industrial Change," Sociology, 51:2 (2017): 466–482.

⁹ Sherry Lee Linkon, The Half-Life of Deindustrialization: Working Class Writing About Economic Restructuring (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018).

¹⁰ David Byrne, 'Industrial Culture in a Post-Industrial World: The Case of the North East of England," City, 6:3 (2002): 279–289.

¹¹ Highmore, Cultural Feelings, 76.

¹² Alice Mah, Industrial Ruination, Community, and Place: Landscapes and Legacies of Industrial Decline (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2012); Steven High, Industrial Sunset: The Making of North America's Rust Belt, 1969–1984 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2003); Linkon, Half-Life of Deindustrialization, 95–130.

¹³ The term "image repertoire" comes from Roland Barthes, A Lovers Discourse: Fragments. Translated by Richard Howard (London: Jonathan Cape, 1979), quoted in Highmore, Cultural Feelings, 79.

¹⁴ Henri LeFebvre, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life, translated by Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore, with an Introduction by Stuart Elden, (London: Continuum, 2004), 15–16; Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, translated by Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).

¹⁵ Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” Representations 108:1 (Fall, 2009): 1–21; Moi, Toril. “‘Nothing is Hidden:’ From Confusion to Clarity; or, Wittgenstein on Critique” in Critique and Postcritique, eds. Elizabeth Anker and Rita Felski (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 31–47.

¹⁶ Dorothy Sheridan, Brian Street, and David Bloome, Writing Ourselves: Mass Observation and Literacy Practices (Creskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2000), 14.

¹⁷ James Hinton, Nine Wartime Lives: Mass Observation and the Making of the Modern Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 17.

¹⁸ Williams, The Long Revolution, 54, 40, 42.

¹⁹ Rita Felski, "The Invention of Everyday Life," New Formations 39 (1999/2000): 15–31.

²⁰ Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).

²¹ Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), vii.

²² Everyday Life in Middletown, "Muncie Directive," at https://bsudsl.org/edlmiddletown/directive/directive-1-how-do-you-feel-about-muncie/, accessed October 30, 2024.

²³ Highmore, Cultural Feelings, 39.

Appendix: Everyday Life in Middletown Directive Prompts 2019-2024

Directive 1 (January-February 2019)

Directions: This directive asks you to share your thoughts and feelings about Muncie, the town most of you live in and the town at the center of the Everyday Life in Middletown project.

Feel free to use your creativity in expressing your thoughts and feelings about Muncie. You can write this out as an essay or a set of disjointed observations, or any other way you like. You do not need to answer the questions below in order (though you may do so if you wish). But do try to address all of the questions, in one way or another, in your response.

The main question we want you to address is: What do you think and feel about Muncie?

Write as little or as much as you like. A good guideline for length would be the average length of your day diaries for us.

As with your diaries, your directive entries will be published anonymously in our on-line archive. While we will not publish your name or any personal information, it is up to you to decide how much or how little about yourself you want to reveal in your writing and to filter out personal information accordingly. As with the diaries, we will review your directives for personal information and contact you if we have questions or concerns.

Optional: Take a photograph that you think typifies Muncie in some way, and send it along with your directive response.

Please return your answer to us by Feb. 12. Questions to address in your answer:

How long have you lived here? If you were not born here, indicate where you came from and why?
Are you happy with where you live? Do you feel like you belong?
Do you expect to stay here for long? What are or will be some of the considerations in deciding how long you stay here?
How would you describe Muncie to someone who has never been here? What are its most distinctive characteristics?
Do you think the ways other people think about Muncie are the same ways you think about it? How do you your thoughts and feelings about Muncie differ from its public image (from media or word-of-mouth around the state and beyond)?
What are your feelings about Muncie’s future? What are your hopes for Muncie? How do you expect Muncie will fare in the years ahead? What changes do you expect?

Directive 2: Covid-19 (March 2020)

The purpose of this directive is to learn in some detail how the Covid-19 pandemic is impacting your everyday life. We are interested in both practical details (how you are managing work, caring for family, eating, etc.) and your psychological and emotional experience of the pandemic.

Feel free to use your creativity in describing your everyday life and in expressing your thoughts and feelings about it. You can write this out as an essay, a set of disjointed observations, or any other way you like. Use the questions below as a guide to what information to include, but do not feel that you have to answer them completely or in order.

Write as little or as much as you like, but a good guideline would be the length of a typical Everyday Life in Middletown day diary: two single-spaced pages.

Our main question is: How is the Covid-19 pandemic impacting your everyday life?

Your completed directives will be published anonymously in our on-line archive. While we will not publish your name or any personal information, it is up to you to decide how much or how little about yourself you want to reveal in your writing and to filter out personal information accordingly. We will review your directives for personal information and contact you if we have questions or concerns.

Please return your answer to us by April 6. Questions to consider in your answer.

How have your everyday routines changed because of the Covid-19 outbreak? Be specific; explain how you are operating now as opposed to before the outbreak.
How have the following activities been impacted by the outbreak: eating, sleeping, working, entertainment, family and social interactions, sex, personal hygiene and grooming, media and news consumption.
How often have you been going out? For what reasons? What have you noticed while you were out?
Tell us about something memorable that has happened in the course of ordinary activities since you started changing your routines.
What has been negative about the ways your routines have changed in the last few weeks? What has been positive?
How would you describe your emotions in the last few weeks?
How would you describe your thoughts in the last few weeks?
How do you think the experience of Covid-19 and the quarantine will impact the future, both for you and more broadly? Do you anticipate any positive changes in your life because of the experience?

Directive 3: Organizing and Experiencing Time (April 2021)

The purpose of this directive is to gain insight into how we experience time in everyday life.

It has become one of the clichés of life during the pandemic that time feels strange to us right now: individual days or weeks seem to stretch on interminably while months pass quickly; even our ability to keep track of the day of the week may seem compromised. We recognize (and hope) that the pandemic may be approaching its end, so we want to capture as much about this aspect of your experiences as we can.

With that in mind, we are interested in how you experience time in daily life, how you attempt to manage and organize it; when time seems short and compressed and when boredom or other factors make time seem to stretch out; and what sorts of thoughts or emotions are attached to these experiences.

Our question and our request is this:

How do you manage and experience time?

Some time during the week of April 1–8, pay attention to moments when you are aware of time; record these moments and what is happening—both in the world around you and in your thoughts and emotions—and submit one to two single-spaced pages describing as much as you can capture about your experience of time.

As always, we want to give you freedom to be creative and to adapt your contributions to EDLM in ways that work best for you. You can write this out as an essay, a set of disjointed observations, or any other way you like. You may choose to do a one-day diary, as we usually do, and to focus on your experience of time during one day. Or you may choose to record instances of time over the course of the week. Use the questions below as a guide to what information to include, but do not feel that you have to answer them completely or in order.

Your completed directives will be published anonymously in our online archive. While we will not publish your name or any personal information, it is up to you to decide how much or how little about yourself you want to reveal in your writing and to filter out personal information accordingly. We will review your directives for personal information and contact you if we have questions or concerns.

Please return your answer to us by April 13. Questions to consider in preparing your answer.

How did the schedules of other people influence when or how you did things?
How much flexibility do you have over the timing of your activities? When is punctuality important and when can you relax about being on time?
How has the pandemic influenced your experience of time during this week?
How much of your ordinary activities require planning in advance?
When do/did you feel rushed and pressed for time? When do/did you feel the least time pressure?
When did time seem to slow down or speed up?
How much time do you spend thinking about the past or the future? How much time do you spend absorbed in t he present moment?

Directive 4: Leisure and Vacation (July 2022)

This directive asks you to share your experiences, thoughts, and feelings about time spent away from work: off-hours, days off, vacations.

Feel free to use your creativity in expressing yourself about leisure and time off. You can write your directive out as an essay or a set of disjointed observations, or any other way you like. You do not need to answer the questions below in order (though you may do so if you wish). Don’t let the questions limit what you share, but do try to answer them all, in one way or another, in your response.

The general question we want to hear from you about is: how does time off work for you?

Write as little or as much as you like. A guideline for length would be the average length of a day diary: 2 single-spaced pages.

Questions to consider:

How do your daily rhythms change on days off and weekends?
How do your interactions with other people, including your family, shift during off-time?
To what extent are you able to “unplug” from work when you’re off? Is it difficult to do so? What makes it difficult?
How important is it for you to have clear boundaries between work and leisure? What are your strategies for doing so?

What do you actually do with your time off? What do you wish you could do?

What do you need leisure to do for you? How can you tell if your leisure time has been successful?

If you are retired, what do you consider to be your leisure activities? How do you separate those from other activity? Do you do anything that would –for a non-retired person—normally be considered “work”? What categories of activity characterize your day?

Directive 5: Work and Online Life (July 2023)

This directive asks you to share your thoughts, feelings, and experiences concerning two separate issues: work and online activity.

As always, feel free to use your creativity in describing the roles work and online activity play in your everyday life. You can write your directive out as an essay (or as two essays), as a set of disjointed observations, or any other way you like. You do not need to answer the questions below in order (though you may do so if you wish). Feel free to discuss the overlap between the two topics. Don’t let the questions limit what you share, but do try to answer them all, in one way or another, in your response.

Work:

Of your everyday activities, what do you define as “work”? In your mind, what differentiates “work” from other activities? (For instance, you may or may not think of unpaid activities such as housekeeping or caregiving as work. Let us know your ideas about what counts as work.)

With this open definition in mind, what is the role of work in an ordinary day for you? (If you wish, describe the work you do in a typical day.)

How do you feel about your work?

Online Life:

What roles does online activity play in your daily life?

Discuss briefly the extent and the ways in which you do the following online:

Work

Play

Socialize

Seek information

Seek entertainment

Engage in other activities

How do you feel about the time you spend online?

Directive 6: Home Life and Religious/Spiritual Practices (July 2024)

This directive asks you to share your thoughts, feelings, and experiences concerning two separate issues: home life and religious/spiritual practices.

As always, feel free to use your creativity in expressing how your everyday life is informed by these factors. You can write your directive out as an essay (or as two essays), as a set of disjointed observations, or any other way you like. You do not need to answer the questions below in order (though you may do so if you wish). Feel free to discuss the overlap between the two topics. Don’t let the questions limit what you share, but do try to answer them all, in one way or another, provided you find them applicable to your life.

Home Life:

What does the word “home” conjure up for you? What does “making a home” mean to you?

Please describe the physical space in which you live (room/apartment/house, etc.). How long have you been there? What do you like or not like about it? (Please give examples).

Do you have favorite or least favorite parts or aspects of your home? To what extent does your home stress you out or give you comfort, and under what conditions or circumstances?

With whom do you share your home? How do you manage caring for it? How does the physical space you occupy make everyday life easy or difficult?

Religious and Spiritual Practice:

Please describe your religious or spiritual beliefs, if any.

How do these beliefs and practice inform your everyday life? Do you think about your beliefs daily? And, if you do so, what sort of thinking to you do?

If you consider yourself agnostic, atheist, or secular, does something in your life play the role that religion or spirituality plays for others? Please describe as fully as you can.

What routine practices in your life are connected to religious or spiritual belief, and how? What benefits do these practices bring you?

Are you happy with your current beliefs and practices? Why or why not? What would you change if you could?

What challenges your beliefs?

RUST BELT HUMANITIES LAB

At Ursuline College

Rust Belt Feelings: Evidence from the Everyday Life in Middletown Project