Recovery in the Mon Valley: Journalism-Sociology Class Sees Angst, Hope

Recovery.

In the hard-hit Mon Valley, recovery, a word of hope, applies both to people working to beat back the stranglehold of addiction and to communities fighting for survival.

These are stories of individuals, often told by journalists armed with curiosity, and stories of society, often told by sociologists fortified with analyses. So a focus on community recovery seemed like a perfect way to unite rising journalists and potential sociologists, led by Maggie Patterson, professor of journalism and multimedia arts, and Dr. Doug Harper, professor of sociology and the Rev. Joseph A. Lauritis, C.S.Sp. Endowed Chair in Teaching with Technology.

“It struck Maggie and me if we could teach a class that is one-half journalism and one-half sociology, we could help each other,” Harper said. “Journalists could learn to use sociological sources and reasoning. Sociologists could learn to write better.”

This is the fourth time that sociologist and photographer Harper and author Patterson have brought graduate and undergraduate students together to enrich their story telling, reasoning and data-finding skills. It also encourages them to envision their work as social justice. A previous two-semester course focused on recovery. This collaboration, now looking more closely at the communities, became the class called Mon Valley Steel Towns: The Anatomy of a Social Disaster.

The initial projects focused on who is imprisoned and why—and uncovered crime rates twice the national average in McKeesport, which has suffered unemployment, economic collapse and population loss. Because arrests often relate to drug use, students are examining addiction and recovery in the context of community.

On Saturdays, class members land in the Mon Valley, learning the neighborhoods of Braddock, McKeesport and Clairton, meeting community organizers and families, and building on interviews with recovering men who live in a halfway house. The experiences are captured in stills, video and words.

“We analyzed every minute of film we shot and transcribed every word,” Harper said of their efforts to look for large-scale themes and focus on social justice in American industrial capitalism.

Students are comparing the main streets of Homestead and Braddock, then and now; the roles of sports, race and class; the relentless efforts to rise above.

“We engage the people and engage the civic process, and see how people try to salvage what’s left in the community,” Patterson said.

For many students from more financially secure homes and neighborhoods, the class experience places human faces in the midst of the struggle to recover health and wealth, fueled by a persistent human spirit. “We’re really trying to get them to write something of substance, based on real human contact,” Harper said.