RESEARCH CONSULTANT · UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS LOWELL
A deindustrialised Midwestern town launched a public-private redevelopment initiative to rebuild community pride and economic opportunity. The official narrative was one of unity and progress. But when we went in and talked to residents, we found that the stories being told about the town systematically erased the experiences of communities of colour and poor white residents. The narratives shaping who got resources and who got left out were hiding in plain sight, embedded in how people talked about their own community. This research won two awards, including the $10,000 Research Prize in Public Interest Communications.
Why This Research Matters for Product Work
This project is about understanding the gap between what stakeholders say publicly and what is actually happening on the ground. That is the core skill of qualitative UX research.
In product work, PMs, engineers, executives, and end users all describe the same product differently. The ability to interview across those power dynamics, identify whose stories are shaping decisions, and surface the perspectives being excluded is exactly what this research trained me to do. The narrative analysis methods I used here are the same skills needed to understand how framing in onboarding flows, marketing copy, or help documentation shapes who feels welcome and who gets left out.
This project also required journey mapping at a community level: tracing how a redevelopment initiative moved through different stages (policy vision, local interpretation, community response, resource allocation) and how different people experienced that process differently depending on their background. That is the same approach used in service design, where you follow different user segments through the same system and surface where the experience diverges.
The Research Context
Galesburg, Illinois is a small city in the rural Midwest that experienced decades of economic decline after its major employers (Maytag, Butler Manufacturing) closed or relocated. The Orton Family Foundation's "Heart & Soul" initiative was designed to rebuild community cohesion and guide redevelopment through resident engagement. On the surface, it looked like a model participatory process.
Professor Teresa Gonzales at the University of Massachusetts Lowell was studying how these kinds of public-private redevelopment initiatives actually work in practice. She hired me as a Research Consultant to conduct qualitative fieldwork, analyse data, and help build the empirical foundation for the study.
How do the stories a community tells about itself shape who benefits from redevelopment, and whose experiences get erased in the process?
My Responsibilities
I was hired to provide end-to-end research support across the full lifecycle of the project. My responsibilities included:
- Conducting qualitative field research in Galesburg, IL on the Heart & Soul public-private redevelopment initiative
- Carrying out 24 in-depth interviews with residents, local elites, community organizers, and public officials
- Transcribing interviews and field notes for analysis
- Conducting archival research using local newspapers, legacy public documents, and historical city laws
- Analysing national-level quantitative and qualitative data on rural poverty and redevelopment patterns
- Contributing to synthesis and co-authoring the published paper
Research Approach
Interviewing Across Power Dynamics
The 24 interviews spanned very different positions within the community: local business owners, city officials, nonprofit leaders, long-term residents, and people who had been excluded from the redevelopment conversation entirely. Each group had a different version of the same story about what was happening in Galesburg. My job was to hold those contradictions together and understand what they revealed about how power operated through narrative.
Archival and Historical Research
I went beyond interviews to examine the documentary record: local newspaper coverage, legacy public documents, and historical city laws. This was critical because some of the narratives shaping present-day exclusion had roots in formal policies that residents no longer consciously referenced but that still structured the town's social geography.
Mixed Methods: Connecting Local Stories to National Patterns
I analysed national-level data on rural poverty and redevelopment, combining quantitative economic indicators with qualitative policy documents. This let us situate Galesburg's experience within broader structural patterns, showing that what looked like a local story was actually part of a national pattern of how deindustrialised communities narrate decline and recovery in ways that reproduce inequality.
Community Journey Mapping
The research functioned as a form of journey mapping at the community level. We traced how the redevelopment initiative moved through stages: from the original policy vision, through local interpretation by officials and nonprofits, to community response and resource allocation. At each stage, we mapped how different residents experienced the process differently depending on their race and class position. The people closest to power experienced a story of progress and inclusion. The people furthest from power experienced a process that never reached them, or that actively erased their presence from the town's self-image.
What We Found
The stories a community tells about itself are not neutral. They shape who gets resources.
Local elites and residents used narratives and discursive framing to erase or exclude communities of colour and, at times, poor white residents. This happened not through explicit exclusion but through the stories people told about their town: who was included in the "we," who was visible in the narrative of recovery, and whose history was acknowledged.
Colorblind racism and classblindness operated together, not separately.
The town's public narrative simultaneously made race and class invisible. Poverty was discussed without mentioning the racial demographics of who was poor. Racial diversity was acknowledged abstractly without connecting it to economic exclusion. These two forms of blindness reinforced each other, making it nearly impossible for residents to articulate what was wrong even when they felt it.
Participatory processes can reproduce the inequalities they claim to address.
The Heart & Soul initiative was explicitly designed to be inclusive. But the framing of participation, the channels used for outreach, and the definition of "community values" all reflected the perspectives of those already closest to power. The process was participatory in structure but exclusionary in practice.
Recognition
The research was published as "The Stories We Tell: Colorblind Racism, Classblindness, and Narrative Framing in the Rural Midwest" in Rural Sociology (2022). It received two awards:
- Outstanding Paper Award (Co-Winner), Society for the Study of Social Problems, Poverty, Class, and Inequality Division, University of Tennessee
- The Research Prize in Public Interest Communications (Winner, $10,000), University of Florida, Centre for Public Interest Communications. This prize is judged by social change practitioners, not academics, meaning the research was recognised for its relevance to people working on real-world communication and design challenges.
What I Would Do Differently
I would have mapped the decision-making ecosystem more explicitly at the start. We discovered midway through that the narratives shaping resource allocation were coming from a small number of influential voices. If I had done a stakeholder mapping exercise earlier, I could have been more strategic about whose perspectives to prioritise in recruitment and whose stories were missing from the public record.
I would also have incorporated participatory design methods into the research. We identified how narratives exclude certain communities from redevelopment conversations, but we stopped at diagnosis. If I ran this again, I would have brought community members into a co-design process to develop counter-narratives and test them with local decision-makers, closing the loop between research insight and actionable change.