Growing up in the small town of Ridgely, TN, having a robust military career was not even on my dad’s radar. He focused on playing football and dating his high school sweetheart (my mother, Melinda). After graduating with a criminal justice degree from Memphis State, my dad took his first assignment at Moundstrom AFB in Montana. Combining 11 moves both state-side and overseas, my dad’s career has blossomed as God has faithfully provided for him through rigorous trainings, pressure filled roles, carefully planned operations, and extensive deployments.

In interviewing my own father, I gained greater insight into his background and career path and can now see the world more clearly through his eyes. This interview offers insight into one man’s military journey, but his testimony speaks out on behalf of many other soldiers who nobly serve every day to keep America a free and thriving nation.

The Journey

Q: How many years have you been in the military?

A: 23 years

Q: When you were younger, did you envision yourself in the military?

A: It wasn’t my lifelong dream but I was always drawn to military traditions and an active lifestyle, as well as the inherent adventure associated with such a profession.

Q: Who encouraged you to join the military?

A: My high school football coach, Cliff Sturdivant, encouraged me to consider becoming a military officer.  He told me the story of one of his previous roommates who had become an officer and led a fascinating and meaningful life.  I was the team’s quarterback and I remember he told me, “It’s a lot like football.  You’re part of a team, everyone has a position and a role to play, and you, as the leader, have to think things through and lead the team toward its goal.  Heck, they even have uniforms!”

Q: What benefits did you see for joining the military and what made you ultimately decide to sign up?

A: I welcomed the chance to serve my country in an incredibly responsible way.  I also knew I would gain valuable leadership experience and work with some of the finest professionals in the country.  Whether I made the military a career or just served the required four years and moved on to a civilian career, it seemed like a terrific way to begin what I hoped to be an interesting and honorable life.

Q: What advice would you give others thinking about joining the military?

A: Do it.  Serve.  I can think of no one who has served who is not better for it.  The length of service one pursues is a personal choice, but however long or short that service, one should consider it a privilege.  I’ve worked with all branches of our military and they are all equally good.  Choose the branch that rewards the type of service to which you are most drawn.

The Work

Q: How has working in a military setting affected your outlook on everyday tasks?

A:  I could answer this question several ways, so please bear with my layered answer.  First, I place significant value on every day I’m alive and walking freely throughout our great country, or as might be the case, one of our Earth’s free nations.  Simple pleasures matter more when you’ve lived a life of service and sacrifice, and the effect is accentuated when you’ve lived in captive cultures, and of course spent time in a combat zone.  Another answer that comes to mind involves one’s perspective on daily world events, news, and happenings.  I believe most career military people would agree that we perhaps see the world through a different lens and are less naïve about the everyday transpirations around the globe.

Q: Do you have any regrets about joining the military?

A: No regrets.  My career has been incredible and I feel I have made the most of my opportunities.  I’ve often thought I might have enjoyed a life of service where I brought a measure of healing to others instead of always wielding the government’s military arm, but I just try to maximize my opportunities to be kind and be good to people.  Perhaps those moments help balance the scale.

Q: What part of your work do you enjoy most?

A: I most enjoy growing young leaders and seeing them succeed as they mature into more senior leaders that have great impact on our world and our country’s future.  It’s quite rewarding to be in a position to use your skills and knowledge to help someone realize their dream.

Q: How has your perspective of the military changed as you have progressed in rank?

A: As one progresses in rank he feels more responsibility for the institution, its relevance, culture, character, reputation, and professional make-up.  You also better understand the institution’s purpose as an instrument of national power, your focus becoming less drawn to tactical heroics and more towards ensuring your branch delivers sovereign options for the United States.

Q: What kinds of opportunities does the military provide that other jobs might not?

A: Of course there are many forms of unique and special training but I believe the military provides an almost unequaled opportunity to work closely and bond with people from every corner of our country and sometimes the globe.   In uniform, you are one team and you leave the vast majority of your prejudices and preconceived notions behind you.  If you love being part of a meaningful team and part of something bigger than yourself, you can find that opportunity in the military.

Q: Where were you when 9/11 happened? What do you remember about that day? What did this mean for the military?

A: When our homeland was attacked on September 11, 2001, I was stationed at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, in Tucson, Arizona.  Specifically, I was exercising in the fitness center when I saw the news reports of the attack on television.  Since Tucson was in the Pacific time zone, it was still very early there.  I saw a news report with one of the World Trade Center towers in flames, then saw the report of the strike on the other tower.  I immediately knew it was an attack, grabbed my cell phone, called the base command post, and put the base on alert.  The day was a long one.  Implementing all our plans took us well into the night and of course, we were in a state of high alert for several weeks, even months, and though the situation has changed and evolved, we have not stopped working, watching, preparing, protecting, and fighting since that day.  For the military, it meant we had to learn how to work with our government and local agencies to protect our homeland, and still stay within the bounds of our Constitution.

Q: What do you wish people who aren’t in the military could understand?

A: In a professional sense, I wish I could share with others the sense of purpose and pride that comes with such service and such teamwork.  I wish people could understand the personal growth that results from being in situations that literally shape history.  In a personal sense, I wish people could understand that military families are a minority sub-culture with specific codes, traits, traditions, and needs.  The lifestyle produces unique and special children but their road is not an easy one.  I think we’ve come a long way towards making people aware.

The Deployments

Q: How many of those years have you spent deployed?

A: Approximately 4 cumulative years

Q: What helps you get through deployments and time spent away from your family?

A:  As an officer, the most difficult element about time away from family lies not with your own loneliness and not with “missing” your family, but instead with the burden of knowing the family misses you so badly, and of course that your loved ones must shoulder the toils of daily life alone. What gets one through the deployment is the knowledge that your work is noble and important, often globally-impacting.  One is also very aware of the responsibilities to ones “military family” in the deployed location.  Finally, deployments and time away are difficult, but in my opinion, I have always returned improved and enhanced by the experience.  If you think you will come back to your family a better person, you can draw inspiration from that notion.

Q: What are some of the hardest things to adjust to when coming home from a deployment?

A:  you come home from combat situations, it’s difficult to adjust to the normalcy’s present in your home country or town, where there’s virtually no indication small wars are being waged around the globe.  The two worlds are so very different.  Of course the environment is different and one’s physical and mental makeup has to adjust to the extreme differences.

Q: How does it feel to know those who lost their lives in battle and how has your faith grown from these experiences?

A:  My faith has grown tremendously over the course of my military career.  I have experienced and seen God’s miracles first hand.  Sometimes we see clearest in austere conditions, when the material trappings of our often politicized and commercialized societies are stripped away.  When you are vulnerable, your senses are enhanced.  I do know people who have lost their lives in battle, or had their physical and/or mental states changed forever, both friend and foe.   Actually, I’m quite aware of many more enemy losses than friendly.  I can’t say my faith has been changed by any of the losses.  My faith in enhanced by the survivors and the survival stories, by the perseverance of those who are neither combatant nor victim, but just caught in the middle and growing up in a state of war, making the most of their lives.  We give those people, and their sons and daughters, the best chance at a better life, and I’m blessed to be part of a team that makes that kind of difference.

Q: Have you ever feared for your life? Obviously you have been in near death situations, but did you ever think you were really in die?

A: Yes, to both questions.

Q: If you quit the military tomorrow, what would be your biggest highlight and regret?

A: If I stopped serving tomorrow, my biggest professional highlight would be commanding a combat task force in Iraq.  My biggest personal highlight would be giving my family so many opportunities to see and understand the amazing world God has provided.  If I quit tomorrow, my biggest regret would be not having spent enough time telling every single one of my troops how gloriously special they are and what a most excellent life of noble work they lead.

Haley Bargery is a Senior Communication Studies Major at Grove City College. Growing up in a military family, she has taken a particular interest in the Muse-Art Project. She desires to see military troops and their families find new ways to express themselves and tell their narratives through outreaches such as the Muse-Art Seminars. Her research will help paint a contemporary picture of the modern, American, military family and enable others to hear their stories and better respond to their needs. After Grove City, Haley hopes to pursue more projects focused on giving a “voice to the voice-less” and using writing as a tool to empower individuals and encourage them to use art to tell their life story.

Wednesday, September 12, 2001 –  Nobody knew the name of the woman who appeared on the front pages all over the world that day. But looking at this iconic photograph compels us to ask the question again, to re-open it as evidence, re-open it as wound:
What was in the air, and where did it go?

******

She has a name, of course. Marcy Borders. She is 28 from Bayo, New Jersey, the mother of a nine-year-old daughter, a former legal assistant for the Bank of America once headquartered on the 81st floor of the North Tower.

And she has become an image. As Marcy escaped from the Twin Towers, the sepia rain of suffocating ash and dust was so thick – it coated her and crunched under foot. While she walked, she stopped and turned.  Startled, she squinted sideways at the photographer. In a flashbulb moment, a New York minute, she became an icon, a human symbol.

Once pinned in a frame, now preserved under glass, a granular nostalgia: she is, and will be remembered. The caption reads:  Dust Lady.

******

Nobody knew the name of this woman who appeared on the front pages all over the world on Wednesday, September 12, 2001. But now her shrouded figure emerging from the dust and detritus reminds us that we are caught in a bind, the space between – that nothing goes away, and that everything has changed.

The legacy of 9/11 is dust. It even has its own human symbol. It blanketed her with the testimony that will never be silenced, the representational summation of the event – the dust of vaporized bodies, buildings, all ruins. And now, looking at this photo once again during one of our participatory art workshops, our students and I reflect on the pervasive power of an image to awaken all of our senses.  There are times when I feel like I can breathe the dust even now.

And in this space between, I am reminded of the transformative power of art – to awaken and to reveal to us another dimension in the crease of the present and the future, the sacred and the profane, the seen and the unseen.

Dr. Jennifer A. Scott is the chair of the Department of Communication Studies at Grove City College. She has taught and lectured on media studies, service-learning, and writing at Ohio University and Grove City College. She has published her research in Communication Studies and Journal of Applied Communication Research, contributed chapters to two books, and performed editorial work on four volumes of Communication Yearbook (Routledge). Her poetry has been published in the Penwood Review and The Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies. Scott has also served as project manager at the Central Region Humanities Center and supervised the creation and planning regional and national programming that honored the artistic legacy of American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. Her project was recognized by the National Endowment for the Humanities as one of their “We the People Projects” in 2003. Dr. Scott received her M.A. and Ph.D. from the Scripps College of Communication at Ohio University.

In his treatise What is Art?, Russian writer Leo Tolstoy ponders these expectations placed on art. And there is no doubt that Malick and his staff saw The Tree of Life as a work of art. Emmanuel Lubezki, the film’s cinematographer, compared it to a Russian novel. But the man in the theatre whose time was wasted most likely came there with a different expectation – namely entertainment and pleasure.

Here is what Tolstoy had to say about what art is not:

Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious Idea of beauty, or God; it is not, as the aesthetical physiologist say, a game in which man lets off his excess of stored-up energy; it is not the expression of man’s emotions by external signs; it is not the production of pleasing objects; and, above all, it is not pleasure. (Tolstoy 387)

Many people would agree with this quote, and then think nothing of the label “Arts and Entertainment” which we see everywhere. When have we seen “Psychology and Entertainment” or “Mathematics and Entertainment”? Art is not the same as entertainment. Rather, as Tolstoy put it, “the activity of art is based on the fact that a man, receiving through his sense of hearing or sight another man’s expression of feeling, is capable of experiencing the emotion which moved the man who expressed it.” In other words, art is a powerful form of communication.

The Tree of Life is an ambitious attempt to communicate to its audience deep feelings of both nostalgia and regret, told mostly through brief, non-linear vignettes. But it is a tough sell to viewers accustomed to Twilight and Transformers. Great art – which summons deeper emotions than lust and anger – demands not only the reception but also the active participation of the listener/viewer.

So there is responsibility on both sides of the stage, screen or canvas. The audience must be a seeker of meaning. But the artist must also take care that they are always about the business of communicating, and not merely hiding meaning solely for the sake of being esoteric or abstruse.

Timothy Mobley is a freelance musician and writer in Pittsburgh, PA. During his music career he has played piano for the New York Grand Opera, the Central Wisconsin Symphony, the Opera Theater of Pittsburgh, the Pittsburgh Playhouse and currently with the Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre School. As a writer he is a regular contributor to the hyper-local news website Patch.com as well as author of a blog about complexity called The Renaissance Mob. Mobley and Jennifer Scott are co-founders of Muse-Art.

What does it mean to “realize” something?

According to Merriam-Webster, it means “to conceive vividly as real: be fully aware of” and ”to bring into concrete existence.” Taken together, these definitions allude to the need for two actors in the process of realizing: a giver and a receiver. One conceives an abstract idea and the other gives birth to a sensory reality. So the artist’s job is to be a disciplined listener to that source beyond self in order to be fully aware of it.

Musicians also use the term when describing the work of a performer. In the Baroque period of music, performers realized notation which had nothing but a bass line and symbols indicating chords and their inversion. From this, a harpsichordist had a great deal of freedom to bring into musical existence a work of sonic reality. Unlike the sculptures of Bernini or paintings of Rembrandt, baroque musical improvisations were made manifest only once for those present to hear it. While today we are able to play from the music scores of Bach and Handel, we will never hear or know the music either of these men realized in the moment. 

Over the centuries, Western music notation has evolved from the scantily clad manuscripts of the baroque’s figured bass to the meticulously dictated notation of today, with only a brief avante-guarde detour through aleotoric music “of chance.” Ironically, as composers have given performers less and less creative freedom, music has simultaneously become detached from emotion. Much music today is more a work of architecture than art – a functional construction rather than an expressive media. And notation – meant to preserve something beautiful – has made the musician a slave rather than a partner.

One of the goals of Muse-Art is to teach individuals how to first discover themselves through a process of listening, then to realize their story using various forms of art. Music is arguably the most abstract of art forms. It is for this very reason that it might be best suited for bringing into existence stories that are difficult to tell. In Method Meets Art, Patricia Leavy has the following to say about music as a means for qualitative research:

The use of music in social research methodologies can be viewed less as an experiment and more as a realization. In fact, music-based methods can help researchers access, illuminate, describe, and explain that which is often rendered invisible by traditional research practices.

As researchers and policy makers work to get at the root of social difficulties, music offers a wealth of tools for reaching the unreachable and telling the unspeakable.

Timothy Mobley is a freelance musician and writer in Pittsburgh, PA. During his music career he has played piano for the New York Grand Opera, the Central Wisconsin Symphony, the Opera Theater of Pittsburgh, the Pittsburgh Playhouse and currently with the Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre School. As a writer he is a regular contributor to the hyper-local news website Patch.com as well as author of a blog about complexity called The Renaissance Mob. Mobley and Jennifer Scott are co-founders of Muse-Art.

 TM: Thank you for agreeing to this interview, Jacob. One point of interest for this blog is how one deals with the unpredictable nature of life. Some of the events which happened to you, leading up to the formation of your band Mae, were out of your control and impossible to predict. What insights can you share about coping with chaos in your life?

Jacob Marshall, founder of band MAE.

JM: Thanks for including me, I love what you are doing with this project and I’m honored to be a part of it. I got my first understanding of chaos on the ski slopes as a kid. It’s perhaps metaphorical to think of it in those terms but unless you surrender to the force and “chaos” of gravity you will never enjoy the freedom of riding. I have found that in just about every area of life “control” is a type of illusion built on chaos. In the grandest sense, our universe is built on the chaos of quantum mechanics and (potentially) m theory. In the most personal sense, our experience of the world arises out of the chaos where physical sensation meets mental perception. The mind’s ability to aggregate all of those vibrations into a perceived “reality” is truly remarkable. If you have had the pleasure of reading Oliver Sacks you know how delicate that experience of “normal” perception is.

“Every act of perception, is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination.”
~Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia

TM: The name of your band stands for Multisensory Aesthetic Experience, and you’ve done some innovative things like spraying your CDs with scents and using multimedia in your concerts. What has been Mae’s goal or driving philosophy behind this multisensory appeal?

JM: In 1911, a Russian painter named Wassily Kandinsky wrote a book titled Concerning the Spiritual in Art. He had an elegant way of describing different forms of art as different languages trying to tell the story of truth. He is often credited for inventing abstraction in art and used his experience with synesthesia as the basis for visualizing music in his paintings. The idea for MAE came out of a two year research project I did back at Old Dominion University on the various relationships between color and sound. I believe that the emergent result of synergistic multisensory expression is just starting to be appreciated and art is evolving more and more in that direction.

TM: Your major at Old Dominion was an interdisciplinary study of aesthetics, which has played a large role in your work as a musician as well. Lately, you’ve made some connections with some notable figures in the art community, including painter Makoto Fujimura. Tell us how his philosophies have influenced your understanding of the arts and aesthetics.

JM: Mr Fujimura is one of my heroes and it has been an extreme pleasure to get to know him over the last two years. He uses the traditional Japanese nihonga materials in his painting but his form is a truly glorious take on abstraction and expressionism. There are always beautiful stories just below the surface of his work. We have really bonded over the artist’s struggle in the digital age and a mutual desire to plot a new course for sustainability. We have been exploring and building a model that marries financial capital, creative capital, and relational capital.

TM: You have a huge interest in the concept of emergence, which is directly related to Chaos Theory. You recently attended a lecture with Steven Johnson in NYC, who has written a whole book called Emergence. Any nuggets of wisdom you’d like to share from that event?

JM: That event was very special for me. We (mae) are in the middle of a two-month tour right now and we rarely get days off. We happened to have a night off in NYC on the exact night that two of my intellectual heroes were having a discussion about my favorite topic. Kevin Kelly and Steven Johnson both have new books out that respectively deal with emergence. Kelly’s book What Technology Wantslooks at the big picture of tech and makes interesting comparisons between the evolution of technology and nature. Johnson’s book Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovationlooks at the types of environments that foster breakthrough ideas. He shatters the illusion of the “eureka” moment and reveals the emergent nature of innovation. To top it all off, the host for the evening was Robert Krulwich of my favorite podcast/radio show, Radio Lab.

The main thing I took away from the evening was how the reality of innovation is much messier and than you might think. It’s much more like a flower slowly growing toward the sun than like systematic series of obvious steps. True breakthroughs are only ever obvious in hindsight. They require many mistakes. So when I am in the middle of any creative situation and feeling stuck, I will simply try to step back, see the bigger picture, and readjust my approach.

TM: Emergence has played a big part in Mae’s activities this past year. Can you tell us a little about how your “Make a Difference” project has employed the idea of emergence?

JM: After nine years of being singularly focused on mae, we knew that this was probably going to be our last chapter. We wanted to write an ending to this story that we could look back and be proud of. At it’s core, this “Make A Difference” campaign was forum for collaboration between mae and our listeners. We wanted to take the big picture of community development and break it down to the pixel level. In 2009, we recorded and released a new song every month exclusively through our website www.whatismae.com. Listeners from all over the world were able to download it directly from us for a donation. We committed all of the donated funds that came in to very specific humanitarian projects that we chose in tandem with our listeners. Over the course of the year we were able to fully fund and build a home for a family in VA with Habitat For Humanity. We also funded a variety of classroom needs with donorschoose.org and created a community service challenge for Destination Imagination called Project Outreach.

It’s so easy to look at the problems in the world and feel helpless. This project gave us and our listeners a chance to adjust our perspective and think of our individual actions as the pixel. Since a digital picture literally emerges out of the interaction between the pixels this served as a very appropriate metaphor. People took the vision and ran with it. We released one song per month and told a story over the course of the year musically. But the real story was being told by our listeners. Every time someone downloaded our music they were changing the pixels in a very specific picture. The solutions emerged out of the interactions between people as they were inspired to contribute humble pieces to a larger puzzle. We all worked together and the story that was written is something I will always be proud of.

TM: So Mae is disbanding, but, as you’ve said, the seeds from this project will continue to grow and take on a life of their own. You’re starting a new band now called “River James,” but what is next for you in your aesthetic and social entrepreneurship endeavors?

JM: The final mae shows will be in China and Japan in February. After that it’s all a bit up in the air. That is when chaos theory will completely take over my life I am working on a new music project called River James and you can download our music for free at www.riverjamesmusic.com. I am also slowly working on a book called “Bear t.ia mart.” Thank you for the interview, it has been a pleasure!

Timothy Mobley is a freelance musician and writer in Pittsburgh, PA. During his music career he has played piano for the New York Grand Opera, the Central Wisconsin Symphony, the Opera Theater of Pittsburgh, the Pittsburgh Playhouse and currently with the Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre School. As a writer he is a regular contributor to the hyper-local news website Patch.com as well as author of a blog about complexity called The Renaissance Mob. Mobley and Jennifer Scott are co-founders of Muse-Art.

If we are to truly honor the stories we tell, we must craft a place within our research to support the exploration of doubt and to share more of our damaging or unhelpful experiences with community engagement.  There are always struggles and setbacks on the path to change. This realization resonates with those who recognize that social change is not a linear process. Moreover, it intimates the need for more ethnography and longitudinal studies as well as for more experimentation with participatory methodologies like participatory art and photovoice (Wang & Burris; Novak, 2010). I believe that participatory art and photovoice are uniquely equipped to examine deep divisions of religion, class, gender, and race, thereby reshaping community engagement initiatives around a critical understanding of community and community representation. Currently, we are in the initial stages of conducting a participatory action research project with military families in western Pennsylvania. This methodology requires a willingness to engage in the complex and contentious process of pursuing mutually transformative programs for social change. Tensions are therefore fundamental and necessary because social change emerges from a dialectical process of struggle between competing poles of communicative action (Papa, Singhal, and Papa, 2006).

An important first step in this process is to recognize where and how my own potentially harmful agenda(s) may emerge in the process. I must be willing not only to listen but to transform my own practices, such as challenging the privileged voice of the researcher and initiating a process of community review of research. From this perspective of doubt, I believe it is important to take the time to learn how to listen – both within myself and with others – so that we may co-create a culture, the kind, as Barnett Pearce describes, that does not foster “speaking so that others want to listen,” but “listening so that others want to speak.”

For as long as I can remember, my life has been animated by this desire to understand what we mean by “calling.” My work as a scholar, teacher, and consultant has been rooted by the questions that intrigued me as a child:  How do you find your calling? Can you lose it? When – and where – does it begin? Does it ever end? Is it something “out there” you must retrieve? Or might it be already present, waiting to unfurl within you?

My pursuit to answer these questions has led me into and out of (and back into) the academy.  As a boundary spanner, I have developed comfort and skill in residing in the liminal space between sacred and secular places, identities, and stories. As I retrospectively reflect upon my calling, I have learned that the gift of a meaningful life is realized in and through organizational contexts.  Our lives are composed of intersecting organizing discourses – those we employ in our labor and our leisure – in our homes, schools, churches, workplaces, and communities. These sites, in turn, become what Geertz (1983/2000) dubbed “crafts of place” – places from which we depart and return in our reflections. Indeed, these crafts of place form a web from which our autobiographies are spun.

With one foot in and one foot out of the academy, my calling as a Christian and as a communication scholar has been nurtured by the interrelationship between autobiographical narratives and master stories, between those stories we long to tell and those that we are afraid to or unwilling to admit.  During graduate school, I began to reflect upon this nexus in light of my experiences as an undergraduate student and career counselor at a Christian liberal arts college.  These reflections inspired me to engage in my first ethnographic study, which examined the relationship between Christian students’ understanding of calling and the dominant career notion of the enterprising self and its manifestations in personal branding and success (Scott, 2007). And what I found was surprising and unsettling.  Instead of heroic tales filled with insight and clarity, I was confronted with calling narratives weighed down with tensions and contradictions. I began to see the effects that emerge when religion collides with, permeates, and is sometimes co-opted by instrumental rationalities and secular interests. In showing how Christian identities are constituted through the interplay of religious and entrepreneurial discourses, I began to recognize that the engagement of paradox and contradiction is necessary for the possibility of social change.

And with it, a new landscape of communication research unfolded before me. Slowly, I began to discover the transformative change that occurs when we realize, in the words of Dewey (1910/1933), that: 

one can think reflectively only when one is able to endure suspense and to undergo the trouble of searching. To many persons, both suspense of judgment and intellectual search are disagreeable, they want to get them ended as soon as possible. They cultivate over-positive and dogmatic habit of mind, or feel perhaps that a condition of doubt will be regarded as evidence of mental inferiority. […] to be genuinely thoughtful, we must be willing to sustain and protract that state of doubt which is the stimulus to thorough inquiry (pp. 15-16).

Adopting this perspective, communication scholars can carve new crafts of place by examining how religious inquiry can interrupt and enlarge our potentialities and capacities. We must embrace what Dewey (1910) called a “forked road” situation, one that fosters a state of doubt as a prerequisite for thoughtful deliberation. Communicative behaviors and phenomena must be considered for their potential harms alongside their potential benefits to form a more complete picture. In short, the positive cannot exist without the negative. We cannot fully understand the potential for liberation without also coming to know its potential for hegemony. Nor can we fully understand the strength of any faith without engaging doubt. Sharing stories of uncertainty, painful situations, and failures helps us construct and sustain moral character. Without conflicting and difficult experiences, endorsing values such as justice, wisdom, and transcendence is devoid of meaning. Indeed, both in our faith and scholarship, we come to realize that failures shape us as wholly as successes do – perhaps even more so.

Dr. Jennifer A. Scott is the chair of the Department of Communication Studies at Grove City College. She has taught and lectured on media studies, service-learning, and writing at Ohio University and Grove City College. She has published her research in Communication Studies and Journal of Applied Communication Research, contributed chapters to two books, and performed editorial work on four volumes of Communication Yearbook (Routledge). Her poetry has been published in the Penwood Review and The Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies. Scott has also served as project manager at the Central Region Humanities Center and supervised the creation and planning regional and national programming that honored the artistic legacy of American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. Her project was recognized by the National Endowment for the Humanities as one of their “We the People Projects” in 2003. Dr. Scott received her M.A. and Ph.D. from the Scripps College of Communication at Ohio University.

Our arts-based methodology is centered on a collaborative and emergent approach known as participatory action research (PAR). PAR involves a braiding of traditional and innovative research methods to explore issues that are important to our clients with the aim of promoting sustainable positive change in local community contexts. As we work on art together, something beautiful and tangible comes into being and works inside our clients and us.  Through a process of creative inquiry, reflection, and dialogue, the invisible becomes visible, and we learn to truly see the world not only in terms of “what is” but “what could be.”  

Our work is rooted in the notion of participatory cultures. The notion of “participatory” involvement has its origins in grassroots advocacy as an approach (rather than a method) that acknowledges young people as active agents with the capacity to make valuable contributions. More recently, participatory cultures are used to describe the online digital media communities that inspire and support young people’s involvement. Henry Jenkins’ (2009) definition of participatory cultures refers to digital media contexts but it can also be applied to the community we seek to create with military youth:

A participatory culture is “a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices. A participatory culture is also one in which members believe their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connection with one another.”

One of the most important functions of participatory cultures is the deliberate attempt to create more collaborative and equitable opportunities for sharing knowledge and understanding on issues that matter and make a difference to the lives of those who are marginalized or overlooked by society.  We are intentional about engaging our clients in a process of “unlearning” or “re-orienting” of what constitute an “expert” and empowering them with the skills and knowledge that are necessary for bringing about positive change. By mentoring our clients in the process of learning to ask questions and thinking about what questions are the most important to ask, they begin to find themselves at the center of the inquiry process. This is the first step in laying the foundation for successful advocacy that is rooted in true knowledge and understanding.

The process is ever ancient, ever new: a story is not a story until it is told. It is not told until it is heard.

Dr. Jennifer A. Scott is the chair of the Department of Communication Studies at Grove City College. She has taught and lectured on media studies, service-learning, and writing at Ohio University and Grove City College. She has published her research in Communication Studies and Journal of Applied Communication Research, contributed chapters to two books, and performed editorial work on four volumes of Communication Yearbook (Routledge). Her poetry has been published in the Penwood Review and The Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies. Scott has also served as project manager at the Central Region Humanities Center and supervised the creation and planning regional and national programming that honored the artistic legacy of American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. Her project was recognized by the National Endowment for the Humanities as one of their “We the People Projects” in 2003. Dr. Scott received her M.A. and Ph.D. from the Scripps College of Communication at Ohio University.