After months of community-engaged work in Fayette County, Pitt’s team took off for the 25th-annual Appalachian Collegiate Research Initiative conference last Friday, December 4th. From the beginning of the semester, I had highly anticipated this portion of the project, and it did not disappoint. Pitt was the second of 13 schools from all across Appalachia to present, all of us centered around work done with a community partner advancing economic development in the region. As expected, Thursday evening was when we did the bulk of our revision from the much-smaller Connellsville presentation, as it was the first time all ten of us and our advisors had been in the same place since. We spent most of our time deciding how best to contextualize Fayette County within western Pennsylvania to an audience that was likely unfamiliar, and then deciding on the key takeaways we wanted them to walk away with. 

The conference began with openings from East Tennessee State University’s Ron Roach and Appalachian Regional Commission Federal Co-Chair Gayle Conelly Manchin. I enjoyed learning more about the ACRI’s background and also how wide the network of student presenters expands, particularly those who have earned their PhDs and come back to teach at schools that offer the project. This drove home that “brain drain” certainly exists in Appalachia, but leaders also frequently come back and use their university educations to do good in their communities. At 9:25 sharp, it was time for us to speak for 15 minutes about the results of countless hours of preparation, conversation, community engagement, and contemplation. I was really proud of our group’s final presentation. A distinct difference from the Connellsville iteration was that the questions we received were not broadly-phrased softballs, but specifically inquiries regarding how successfully we’d ethically engaged with the Fayette County community. I thought our answers to these questions were one of the strongest portions of our presentation and demonstrated how, though we couldn’t change that we were coming in as outsiders, our team had dedicated ourselves to becoming truly immersed in the communities we studied.

The benefit of presenting so early in the conference was that once it was over, we could focus solely on listening to the other groups. At my table were Westminster College students, who were all sophomore history majors working on digitizing and modernizing collections at the Beaver Area Heritage Museum. The projects’ topics largely depended on what their respective community partners had identified as necessary, which is as it should be. Some projects, like East Tennessee State’s development of a task force initiative and Indiana University of Pennsylvania’s research of maternal healthcare in Appalachia, focused more on data collection, whereas some, like Westminster’s and to some extent ours, took a more hands-on approach. This also reflects how far each group is in their work, as it is nearly impossible to move from a proposal to implementation within just a semester. One group member from Marshall University in West Virginia spoke about sleeping on a church floor overnight during a site visit, reflecting immense dedication to community service. A major talking point of Pitt’s specific approach to the ACRI is that we are in the fifth-year of a ten-year partnership, but I truly believe in the merit of this. I cannot imagine what our work would look like without the foundation that previous cohorts have laid.  

As cliche as it might sound, the biggest asset my cohort collectively identified is the people in Fayette County who have dedicated their lives to holding their community together. One of the negative perceptions about Appalachia is the idea of abandonment, and while that might be externally true, internally, we encountered so many librarians, teachers, artists, and public servants thoughtfully and intentionally fighting for Fayette County’s success. This does not negate the state, regional, and federal work that remains, but it has been personally transformative to come to this realization and given me immense respect for all of these people. Another incredibly rude sentiment propagated about particular rural parts of Appalachia is the idea that you would have to be crazy to want to live or stay there. While I have never felt that way about Fayette County and often admired its beauty while driving through, it would be impossible to feel that way after how much exposure I’ve had to the numerous assets we visited as part of the project. A side benefit of the ACRI as a whole is that it creates ambassadors ready to proselytize about the amazing aspects of their respective community and the merits of asset-based development, and this has already been my experience.

When I am old and gray, I will summarize this project to my grandchildren (hopefully) as the time I spent a semester driving to Fayette County, Pennsylvania with other Pitt students, visiting landmarks, talking to people about what they did and didn’t like in their community, and eating really delicious gelato. I will tell them about how Appalachia is not a monolith (though I probably wouldn’t use that word, and ideally by then we’ll have transcended negative perceptions of the region) and how the most important parts of interacting with a community you enter as an outsider are being willing to make yourself uncomfortable and committing to true listening. I will also tell my grandchildren about how much fun I had exploring D.C. and meeting people outside of my usual geographic residence and area of study, both within the Pitt team and from other schools. 

This course was entirely different from any other college course I’ve taken. As a first-year, I don’t yet have a ton to compare it to, but it is nevertheless miles away from my present and previous political science coursework. Every milestone we set or takeaway we drew had to be rooted in pragmatism and not theory, which was excellent experiential learning and also significantly more challenging to me than just analyzing a journal reading or study created by a predetermined methodology outside of my control. I had also previously seen social science research as largely relegated to game theory and complex quantitative data, vital to the study of politics and human development but with a certain level of inaccessibility attached, and it was eye-opening to see how community-engaged research as a discipline differs. I hope I get a chance to work on a project like this again, because I really value the interdisciplinary approach and emphasis on equally-weighted partnership that the ACRI identifies. On personal and professional levels, this project has taught me so much, and I look forward to seeing what community-engaged research in Fayette County will look like for the next five cohorts of this project.