On November 17, our team returned to Fayette County to present our research to a group of community leaders at the Connellsville Canteen. Hosted graciously by the Fayette County Cultural Trust, our presentation was an open and informal affair that aligned with the principles of research co-creation that form the basis of community-engaged research. This blog post will serve as a recounting of that presentation, and my key takeaways from the experience.

Once we arrived, I was delighted, if a little intimidated, by the size of our audience. Apparently, in three years of this research initiative, this was the largest turnout for the community presentation to date. If I remember correctly, not a single seat was left vacant. From business owners and nonprofit organizers to local government representatives, it truly felt like the room was full of some of Fayette County’s most driven movers and shakers.

Following lunch, our team took the stage and began our presentation. Each of the disciplinary groups spoke about the particular foci and conclusions of their work, kicked off by the Urban Studies group, myself included. Charged with the holy task of refining an asset map of Fayette County, our goal in the presentation was to help these local leaders understand the principles behind asset mapping as a strategy and the utility of our final map. Explaining our new subcategorization approach, we used a few example visualizations to communicate how more granularity in the asset dataset can enable the creation of new and insightful maps that show Fayette County’s strengths from several different perspectives. A map of assets related to the tourism economy displayed how these businesses are concentrated around Fayette County’s major attractions, urban centers, and along the major highways. Another map showing the assets that provide transportation in the county was illuminative in another way: the sheer amount of empty space and the meager number of points–most of which were clustered around Ohiopyle–echoed sentiments we heard during our site visits that Fayette County struggles with transportation and remains very geographically isolated. Combining this community feedback with our map made a clear argument that a prosperous future for Fayette County is dependent on establishing stronger transportation links between various locales. It seemed to me that the community leaders present were receptive to the utility of our maps. One visualization showing every single asset identified during the span of this research project produced a heartening image of a county full of points. Compared to the pessimistic narratives often tied to economic revitalization about the present state of affairs, this asset map made the argument–in fewer words and with more clarity than we could hope to achieve using words and slides–that Fayette County is not a lost cause; that, in fact, Fayette has a wealth of strong points, both physical and institutional, to build from.

Ultimately, our presentation lasted much longer than we thought it would and went off without a hitch. Despite some anxieties going into the meeting, each group shared their work with a mixture of confidence and pride that reflected our passion for the project. Erin Horter and Chad Greville of the Political Science group wrapped up the presentation and took on the daunting task of fielding questions from the audience. Immediately, the room opened up into a dialogue between our team and community leaders, and questions and suggestions galore were raised. To me, the eager participation of our audience was evidence that we had successfully fostered an environment of collaborative research co-creation. Rather than being stumped into silence by a torrent of academic jargon and prescriptive statements from us student researchers, the gathered community leaders were all too happy to lend their valuable expertise to our work and provide recommendations for the future of the project.

The Connellsville presentation truly felt to me like the culminating moment of our semester of research, but the ACRI conference in Washington, D.C. remained. Following our success in Connellsville, our team was more confident than ever going into the conference, and the trip seemed to be more of a celebration than an obligation. The rules for presenting at the conference were different: we were required to produce a poster, and our presentation had to stay under a 15-minute time limit. Whereas Connellsville was a more casual and open affair, this would have to be a tight, well-rehearsed tour de force–a semester’s worth of work across four different disciplines summarized in a quarter of an hour. By this point, we were so familiar with our research that the poster came together with ease, and most of our preparation for the conference focused on getting our presentation under the time limit without sacrificing any of the findings or details we thought were most important.

The conference spanned two days and featured presentations from several higher learning institutions hailing from across Appalachia, ranging from upstate New York to Georgia. It was interesting to see how each school took a different approach to community-engaged research, but generally, the scope and ambition of the projects were related directly to the size of the school. I enjoyed the intermissions the most; mingling with other student teams, I learned a great deal about several Appalachian communities. I was struck with how simultaneously heterogeneous and homogenous the problems faced by these communities are, especially noting the many analogous stories to Fayette County. Each struggling community has its own specific set of local problems, of course, but across all the projects we witnessed, some overarching commonalities arose. We have described Appalachia as “left behind” several times during the course of this project, but seeing how this manifests in so many different local contexts painted a broader picture of a truly regional set of issues. Across Appalachia, the communities being studied face challenges of institutional thinness and locating necessary resources. In this way, Fayette County is like so many other Appalachian communities. 

Thanks to our preparation and some serious rehearsal time, our presentation went exceptionally smoothly. I was left feeling that the time limit had forced us to cut quite a bit from the final product, and I truly wish that we could have gone into more detail on some points. Nevertheless, it was once again a source of pride to be able to speak about our research. My next blog post will go more into depth on this topic, but the trip home for me was filled with bittersweet notions that the project had come to a close; I had grown very close with my colleagues over the semester, and working together with these brilliant minds has been fulfilling, exciting, and insightful.