A combination of anthropology and design is helping to ensure a community leader’s legacy continues long past her retirement.
Dr. Jennifer Long had been partnering with RECOVER Urban Wellbeing on community-engaged research projects for a while when she learned that Susan Coward was retiring. Finding a way to capture the manager of urban wellness’s decades of experience was the focus of an assignment in her course on ethnographic methods.
Back in 2021, Dr. Long recorded a series of interviews with Susan Coward and members of the RECOVER team to figure out what made that organization work. The interviews were transcribed, coded and crafted into bite-sized stories by Dr. Long’s Ethnographic Research Methods course, where anthropology students created a kind of guide that captured Coward’s insights and what she might do in various workplace and community scenarios.
“Partway between a single-person ethnography and an institutional ethnography, this project was about making sure that a huge amount of tacit knowledge wasn’t lost,” says the assistant professor.
But the project wasn’t only about capturing data. The entire project team wanted the class’s work to be something that people would use, so Dr. Long secured funding through the LevelUp work-integrated learning program and set out to find Bachelor of Design students to turn the ethnography into a printed book.
When Johannah Ko, a fourth-year design student, asked for special permission to take a 400-level anthropology seminar in Fall 2022, Dr. Long responded, “You’re the one I’ve been waiting for.”
Together with Anne Morin (who just graduated from the Bachelor of Design program), Ko dug into the hours of transcripts gathered from interviews with Coward and her colleagues at RECOVER, the text compiled for the book and insights from the project team.
“We came into this project at the tail end – long after Dr. Long, Susan, the team at RECOVER and the class of anthropology students had begun this work,” says Ko. “We could feel the time, care and love the entire group had poured into this project.”
To reflect that, the two designers approached the book as a living artifact, says Morin. “We wanted for people to go on a journey while reading it – to interact with the book and write in it while they are reading and interpreting it.”
After months of crafting mood boards, creating illustrations and working with project partners, From Precious to Practical: Susan’s Journey through the City is now in print. The book asks 10 questions on everything from building relationships to hierarchy to disruption. For each question, several “plays” highlight stories from Coward, her thoughts/musings and cautions.
Seeing Coward’s hard-won knowledge being passed on to the next generation of City of Edmonton staff is a great example of how anthropology and design can come together to serve the community in unique and inspiring ways, says Dr. Long.
“Community-engaged research provides opportunities for both my students and myself to learn, and for our local community organizations to reflect on the important work they do.”