Four scholars in the Multidisciplinary Undergraduate Research Institute (MURI), who had gained experience in a previous study aided in part by the Solution Center, last spring mentored undergraduates conducting an ethnographic study of Indianapolis’s old Southside Babe Denny neighborhood. That neighborhood was once home to a range of racial and ethnic groups; the student project is focusing on two in particular, Sephardic Jewish immigrants and African-Americans. Sephardic Jews are Jews who trace their origins to Spain and Portugal prior to the edict of expulsion issued during the Inquisition in 1492. After that time, this particular community scattered mostly to southern Europe, Turkey, the middle east and northern Africa. Daniel W. Branstrator, junior in anthropology and geography; Margaret S. “Maggy” Baurley, senior in anthropology; Molly J. Dagon, senior in anthropology; and Stephanie M. Yarian, senior in anthropology and environmental health science, led peers in ethnographic fieldwork, including recording interviews with residents, scanning their old photos and other memorabilia and investigating archival sources. Since the 1920s, critical policy initiatives have changed Babe Denny’s topography from that of a walkable, organically integrated neighborhood of houses and schools interspersed with mom-and-pop businesses to a freeway-bisected patchwork of dead-end streets, factories, stadium parking lots and gentrified historic houses. By the 1970s, the neighborhood had become primarily African-American; hence this population was disproportionately affected by the construction of I-70. One of the MURI scholars’ mentees is pursuing this displacement in greater detail this year for her senior project in Anthropology. Despite various disruptions to the neighborhood, each community has remained tightly knit. The current project is titled, “The Neighborhood of Saturdays” because of the Jewish observance of Sabbath on Saturday but also because former African-American residents of the neighborhood have held a an annual reunion on the first Saturday of August for the past 35 years. Members of each of these communities, many of whom had not seen each other in 30 or 40 years, came together regularly to exchange memories of the old neighborhood and to look at each other’s photos, school yearbooks and other materials. “Both communities have been so good-hearted in entering into this,” said Associate Professor of Anthropology Susan B. Hyatt. “They have been very enthusiastic about collaborating with one another and with the students to see the history of the community preserved. One of the MURI scholars, Stephanie Yarian, came up with an idea that allowed students an opportunity to digitally scan neighborhood materials. She suggested that “scan-a-thons” be held, where former Southsiders from both communities could come together to share their memorabilia while students scanned it. Former neighbors also engaged in a participatory mapping project, marking on plat maps the former locations of homes, businesses, and institutions. People reminisced fondly about teachers, families and gathering spots. Hyatt remarked that at the scan-a-thons, people saw photos of their own family members they had never seen before. “It was very touching,” she recalled. This ethnographic research project was a chance for students to see that they can be independent researchers, participating in the process of collecting their own primary data and turning it into scholarly work. The high point of the project was when the four MURI scholars attended the spring conference held jointly by the Society for the Anthropology of North America and the Association for Black Anthropologists in Denver last April. “They were among a very few undergraduates who presented papers there,” mentioned Hyatt. “They were the first panel and got so much attention.” The class is working closely with Kristi Palmer and the Digital Libraries team to catalogue all of the material we have collected thus far and to set up an on-line digital museum that will be launched concurrently with the book, The Neighborhood of Saturdays. “It is tremendously rewarding to do this work,” commented Hyatt. “Anthropology is such a great tool for explaining both how and why communities come apart and how they come together. We have seen a lot of the latter in this research, and it has meant a great deal to everyone involved.”