Lisa, you've been creating not only murals on your own, but you've been creating a formal framework to help us understand mural activity better.

Tell us about the focus of this research that you've been doing and what you've been discovering.

- Sure.

The focus of my research is about community engagement in murals.

So we put a lot of emphasis on murals being great for communities, but how do those images represent the people who are in those communities and whose voice is it that is being shown through the murals?

Who gets to decide what goes on the walls?

And how does this en engage the people who are there?

Who's being represented?

So my research really looks a lot into the process of how murals are put in walls, how murals are initiated, who is included in that process, and how the imagery that are produced in the murals resonate with residents who see these murals on a daily basis.

- And you have engaged in a very interesting data collection process to find out how community residents really do feel.

What did you do?

- Sure.

So as a researcher, I'm not studying bacteria in a Petri dish.

I'm studying people and murals.

And as an artist, the best way for me to really think about this and research this is just simply to use art.

So the research method that I used is called Photovoice.

And for Photovoice, I find research participants, I train them on basic photography skills.

I give them ideas of where to look for for murals in their community.

And then I gave them basically a two-week homework assignment.

Go out into the community and photograph which murals represent your sense of community identity, who you are as you live in your community.

And photograph something that's not in one of our local murals that you feel like is kind of missing from the canon of murals that are out there, that represents your sense of community identity.

All of our participants went out, took photographs, came back, and then collectively, we analyzed them because they're the ones who are taking the photographs.

It's their story that's being heard.

So they're the ones who are going to help me analyze the data.

So we collectively looked at all of the photographs that were entered through Photovoice and came up with data.

We did a content analysis, which simply means we looked for what was in the photographs.

Was it a picture of a person, a bird, a kite?

And then we did a thematic analysis where they tried to really interpret the photographs and see what kind of underlying meanings or themes they could find.

And those were all presented in an art-based way as well.

- And we were going to, we're gonna ask you about that exhibition.

That was a culmination of part of that.

But what were the themes that you found then?

What kinds of images were grabbing people in our area?

'Cause it was what counties?

- So the study was Lackawanna and Luzerne counties, and it was primarily the Hazleton all the way up to Forest City.

If you kind of draw a straight line through the anthracite coal fields.

So my study is anthracite coal region of Northeastern Pennsylvania.

And it followed murals because if you start down at Hazleton and you check for murals on a map, so part of my preliminary research was finding the murals, putting them on a map and figuring out, you know, drawing my boundary regions from my study.

Starts at Hazleton, trickles on up through Wilkes-Barre, Pittston, Scranton, and all the way at the end to Forest City.

- Did anybody take a picture of Thomas Edison in Hazleton?

- Nobody selected that one for my study.

But that is an iconic, you know, probably, I don't know if it's actually the first but a good movement of mural activity happening in Hazleton.

- But what other themes have emerged?

- So, right, themes.

So the transformation and evolution of Northeastern Pennsylvania was the first theme.

And what this is, is it's kind of a duality between people who have lived here with their families from multiple generations, feel very strongly connected to our regions industrial past.

Whether you had a coal mining grandparent, or not even necessarily coal mining, it'd be people who worked in the Times building in Scranton or any of the different industries, silk mills, they feel very connected to that.

And that is a very important part of their identity.

But we are also experiencing in our region an influx, a change in our demographics.

We have an influx of other people coming to the area who don't necessarily, it's not that they don't know the local history, but they're not connecting to it because it's not necessarily an important part of their identity.

And they're kind of looking forward to, you know, they think of this region as like, potential.

You know, I love it here.

You know, it's outdoors.

It's all of these fresh, fun themes and what can be, - Okay, but then you gave us an art exhibition 'cause you've been doing it all in terms of art.

- Sure, yes.

So it's an art-based study.

So I used art to collect my data, and then because it's community-engaged research, I need to communicate my findings with the community.

I could write up a big 100-page paper dissertation and have nobody ever read it because who wants to sit there and read it.

But what I did instead was an art exhibition.

It's an installation, it was at AFA Gallery in Scranton, and it was an immersive data visualization experience.

It's kind of a very complicated way to explain, but I used string to represent different themes that were conveyed through the photographs.

And now the participants are the people who came up with these themes and threaded all of these themes together, and they came up with these three overarching canopies.

So NEPA evolution was just one of those canopies.

Social responsibility was another canopy.

And then the final canopy was holistic wellbeing.

So kind of like a recreation, mindfulness, health, kind of theme that emerged.

- Well, that's very exciting.

And you're not a doctor yet, but yet you're on your way.

- Not yet, soon.

- Thanks so much, Lisa.

- And greetings, Debi.