- Jennie Ann Cole is an Assistant Professor in the College of Health and Human Performance at East Carolina University.
Her work focuses on community engagement and social activism within marginalized and vulnerable groups. She has become increasingly interested with the use of visual art 
and narrative expression in developing community partnerships to address social problems, specifically chronic homelessness. Jennie Ann earned a Master of Arts in Social Service Administration from the University of Chicago and a doctorate in social work from The University of South Carolina.
- I am committed to building a collaborative research environment. By building bridges across communities, we can work together for the betterment of society. I have become increasingly interested with the use of art and developing community partnerships to address social problems. I am a mixed methods art based researcher specializing but not limited to social work and public health.
My vision for pedagogy, research, and outreach has changed dramatically in the past two years. When the COVID-19 pandemic shut down universities and communities in March of 2020 we had to change the way we were educating rapidly. However, what this has shown us is that as social workers we are resilient and are up to the challenges. We managed to move from face-to-face styles of teaching to online modalities overnight. Along with another faculty member we found the silver lining in this unprecedented shift in higher education and society. Using Photovoice, we sought to help social work students better understand the impact COVID-19 has had on their communities. This has been a powerful and eye-opening experience and has informed the connection between social work theory, practice, and pedagogy. Currently, we are working to disseminate the results to the academic community and local communities in rural eastern North Carolina in the form of art exhibits.
- Undergraduate Research Creativity Award In order to understand the impacts of COVID-19 on the community of Eastern North Carolina using photovoice (Wang & Burris, 1997), we are going to analyze 120 photos and narratives collected from students in SOCW 3402 Applied Research and Statistics in Social Work in Spring 2021 and more data that will be collected from the same course in Spring 2022 (PIs: Drs. Jennie Ann Cole and Mi Hwa Lee). Specifically, we want to understand how social work students have experienced during the pandemic and viewed its impacts on their community. The photo and narratives will be analyzed using thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) to identify common themes. We also are going to apply system theory (Ludwig von Bertalanffy, 1940) while analyzing the data. Systems theory is defined as a ”conceptual framework focusing on the wholeness, pattern, relationship…of phenomena.” This theory will help us to see impacted society on a myriad of levels (i.e., individual level, community level, and society at large).
