Students gain hands-on experience in audio documentary through interviewing Central New Yorkers and creating aural portraits of Finger Lakes landscapes and communities undergoing critical change. The portraits that emerge are of broadcast quality, suitable for podcasting, webcasting, or radio. Some involve still or moving images. The assumption is that stories matter, that stories are a profound way of making sense of the world and transmitting meaning from one generation to the next.

The state is losing its small- to mid-sized farms at a rapid rate, while its remaining farms are burgeoning in size and scope, as agricultural operations become increasingly consolidated into a few mega-buyers and mega-producers. Local agricultural landscapes, in other words, are being remade at dizzying speed by processes largely located elsewhere and operating at increasingly abstract (and global) scales. Under such pressures, how do rural communities make sense of themselves and what is happening to them? How do they move to adopt, reject, or modify the choices of the present? How do they imagine the future? Audible New York documents the human stories of cultural change.

I joined the faculty in 2004. To date, I have been laying the groundwork for this project by researching the issues, gathering equipment, and developing a network of people at Cornell and within the community who can advise and help sustain the project. Through Cornell Cooperative Extension I`ve met with a group of farmers to discuss the project and enlist their feedback. I`ve had a few students do some preliminary work in Savannah, NY, and currently one student is doing an in-depth project on her family`s farm in Cortland. I`ve developed a course devoted to this work (spring 2007). My own field experiences should begin within the year.

How do you evaluate the impact that visceral and compelling stories have on our lives? We know that they move us, stimulate reflection, persuade us, prompt change--even offer comfort and wisdom. While I cannot analyze the future impact of this project in terms of dolalrs and numbers, I will be able, I hope, to point to a website where these stories have been collected and made publicly available, a kind of public space for developing a multi-faceted portrait of Central New York life, a space for trying to make sense of change.

Enhance public understanding of rural life

Some funds for equipment were made available through the Provost`s office, per start-up Landscape Studies program.

Jon Miller (Polson Institute)