Resources for Understanding our Community

As you prepare to engage with the Lewiston-Auburn community, the materials below can orient you and build your understanding of the assets and challenges that exist in our area. Bates students have created these resources with faculty supervision as part of community-engaged learning courses, the Short-Term Action Research Team, and independent research projects. Every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of the content, but we encourage you to use these resources in consultation with a range of other materials as you build your own understanding of our community. 

Story Maps

The projects linked below were created as part of the Harward Center’s 2020-2021 Action/Research Team to help orient students to the partners they will be work with and the issues they will be encountering for their community-engagement work.

Annotated Bibliographies

Students have created the annotated bibliographies linked below as part of classes, research projects, and the Short-Term Action Research Team. 

  • Maddie Santizo ’16, “Resources for Students and Faculty about Somali Communities in Maine,” 2016.
    This annotated bibliography from the 2016 STA/RT cohort offers assessments of a range of resources that can help orient you to the history of Somali population of Maine, with a particular focus on the Somali Bantu Population. 
  • Aidan Richman, “Industrial Architecture in Lewiston,” 2019. 
    This annotated bibliography from the 2019 First-Year Seminar, Lewiston: A Local Lens on Global Issues, offers an introduction to resources for learning about the architectural history of the mills of Lewiston. 
Websites

Climate Change in Maine
Students in Elizabeth Rush Mueller’s short-term course in 2016 interviewed individuals from a wide range of communities and industries to help document the impact of climate change on Maine. This Story Map includes interviews, recordings, and analysis from their project. 

Wabanaki Place Names of Western Maine
As part of their coursework for the short-term course, Wabanaki History in Maine, students compiled Wabanaki place names and their definitions, and mapped their locations. 

Oral Histories

For their final assignment in the First-Year Seminar, Lewiston: A Local Lens on Global Issues, students interviewed a range of community partners about their experiences responding to the COVID-19 pandemic (learn more about this project here). Their interviews were preserved in a collection of COVID-19 oral histories for the Lewiston Public Library as part of broader initiative by Maine Public Libraries to document the pandemic. In addition to providing insight into the community’s experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic, the oral histories linked below can help to build your understanding of our partner organizations and the wider community. 

SCARAB Repository of Student Research

Before beginning a research project on an issue relating to the Lewiston-Auburn community, please review the collection of previous student research in SCARAB carefully in order to ensure that you are building on rather than repeating the work that others have done. This maximizes the impact of your work and avoids overburdening our partners and community members. There are a number of pages in SCARAB devoted specifically to community-engaged work and resources for building understanding of the community. These include:

Community Engaged Research Reports 
A repository of the projects submitted for ES 417: Community-Engaged Research in Environmental Studies

Harward Center for Community Partnerships 
This page serves as a repository for our Harward Center Annual Reports, which include listings of research projects undertaken as part of courses and student research, as well as several bibliographies that students in Professor Elizabeth Eames’ classes compiled of resources relating to the arrival of Somalis in Lewiston.