We are grateful to our community partner in this project, the Muncie Parks and Recreation Board (active members Dr. Shannon Powers, Mr. Mark Ervin, and Mr. Brad Marshal) as well as Parks and Recreation Staff (Mr. Carl Malone, Mr. George Foley, Jr., Mr. Dustin Clark, and Ms. Ashley Wright), who spoke with us about their program, welcomed us to their meetings, and shared their parks survey data and Five Year Plan with us. This project is better for their partnership. We are also grateful to all of the people, the park users, who took time to speak with us about their experiences with Muncie Parks and Recreation. We hope that we have represented your viewpoints accurately.
We are also grateful for the supportive librarians at Ball State , Andrew Misler of Bracken Library and Amy Trendler of the Architecture Library, who led students in seminars to find relevant sources for this project. Becky Marangelli also led us in a class session on how to find archival material about Muncie Parks, where we learned more about Muncie park history.
Many thanks also to Jasmine Davis, a Master’s student in sociology at Ball State, who compiled hundreds of articles from the Muncie Star Press newspaper about parks and recreation in Muncie, coded them, and also spent many hours watching the television show Parks and Recreation in search of choice quotes to pair with our ethnographic research (please see Methods for more on the connection between our project and hit sitcom). Thank you, Jasmine!
Muncie Parks and Recreation 