Lassiter, L. E., H. Goodall, et al. (2004). The other side of Middletown: exploring Muncie's African American community. Walnut Creek, CA, AltaMira Press.
The Other Side of Middletown is a collaborative ethnographic re-study of the famous 1929/1937 American community study by Robert and Helen Lynd of Middletown ,a well-known pseudonym for the Midwestern city of Muncie, Indiana. Through the re-study, the authors aim to address the omission of Muncie's black community from the original study, which portrayed Muncie as exclusively white, revealing rich historical and contemporary stories of the African American community in Muncie. The book is the result of a collaborative ethnographic field project between academics, community organizations, and students, and included intensive interviews, participant observation and archival research. The unique collaborative approach is one of the most important contributions of the book to community studies and to ethnography, and the authors write reflexively about this process in the introduction, throughout the book, and in Appendix A: Notes on the Collaborative Process. The book also comes with a companion DVD, Middletown Redux, which describes the making of The Other Side of Middletown and the unique collaborative research design.