Archives for June 2017

SMCM’s Ellen Kohl Awarded Funding for March 2018 Conference at University of Louisville

June 20, 2017

Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Ellen Kohl

SMCM Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Ellen Kohl and collaborators Dr. Priscilla McCutcheon and Tanisha Stanford at the University of Louisville were awarded funding in June 2017 from the Antipode Foundation to host a conference titled: Let Justice Roll Down Like Waters: The role of spirituality in African American Environmental Activism in the U.S. South. The conference will explore the complicated connections between spirituality and environmental activism among African Americans in the U.S. South.

Dr. Kohl and collaborators seek to address four key questions through the conference: 1) How does spirituality influence African American involvement in environmental activism? 2) What specific spiritual expressions do we see in African American environmentalism? 3) How do African Americans spiritual engagement with the environment helps us to expand our definition of spirituality more broadly? 4) How does an engagement with spirituality expand our understanding of what activism is? The conference will bring together scholars, activists, and faith leaders to expand the conversation beyond the confines of academia, incorporating the people who are engaging with questions of African American spirituality and the environment through their daily work.

The conference will be held at the University of Louisville in Louisville, Kentucky from Thursday, March 1 – Saturday, March 3, 2018. Participants will present papers during several thematic sessions, providing ample time for discussions to occur between the presenters and between the presenters and the audience. A portion of the conference sessions will be available via livestream on the conference website and the University website, with appropriate care given to providing a safe space for conference participants to discuss what may be deeply personal experiences with spiritualty and environmentalism. The final product for this conference will be an edited volume on race, spirituality, and environmental activism, co-edited by Dr. McCutcheon and Dr. Kohl, and ideally published in the University of Georgia Press’ Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation series.

The Antipode Foundation is a UK registered charity that publishes Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, a peer-reviewed scientific journal released five times per year by Wiley-Blackwell, typically focusing on social justice issues.

Assistant Professor of Anthropology Liza Gijanto Awarded Prestigious Howard Foundation Fellowship

June 19, 2017

Assistant Professor of Anthropology Liza Gijanto

Assistant Professor of Anthropology Liza Gijanto was awarded a highly-competitive Howard Foundation Fellowship in April 2017 for her project titled: Emancipation and Commerce: The Gambia Colony and American Plantations in the Age of British Abolition. The $33,000 fellowship for the 2017-2018 academic year will support Dr. Gijanto’s research which examines the nature of the impact of the Atlantic trade on the Gambia River. Dr. Gijanto was one of just eight nationwide 2017-2018 fellowship recipients and the only recipient in the field of archaeology. Other 2017-2018 fellowship recipients were selected from the fields of photography and anthropology and range from professors at large institutions such as UCLA to independent artists collaborating with organizations such as NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

This distinguished award will allow Dr. Gijanto to complete data-gathering for the Emancipation and Commerce project and begin writing a monograph describing the work. The project will advance understanding of the complex history of abolition in West Africa, a program that was ironically undermined by the continued consumption of goods produced by enslaved laborers in the Americas within an African colony founded to end the traffic of slaves. Dr. Gijanto will travel to two archives: the Peter Strickland Archive in Mystic, Connecticut and the British National Archives in Kew, London, during Fall 2017 and begin work on the monograph in Spring 2018.

The Howard Foundation is associated with Brown University and is one of few funders dedicated “to furthering the personal development of promising individuals at the crucial middle stages of their careers in the liberal and creative arts”. The Howard Foundation awards a limited number of fellowships each year for independent projects in selected fields, targeting its support specifically to early mid-career individuals and those who have achieved recognition for at least one major project.

Assistant Professor Kristy A. Lewis’ Collaborative Research Project Investigates Community and Ecological Impacts after the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill

June 7, 2017

Kristy A. Lewis, Assistant Professor of Coastal Ecology

Kristy A. Lewis, Assistant Professor of Coastal Ecology at SMCM, received highly competitive funding from a National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Gulf Research Program Synthesis Grant to participate in a collaborative project titled: Community Cohesion and Recovery after the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill. The work is crucial to disaster management as it examines a community’s ability to self-organize and mobilize after a major disruption such as the oil spill occurring in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.

Dr. Lewis’ two-year $77,000 award is part of a larger overall NAS award ($590,000; NAS Award # 200007629) directed by principal investigator Dr. So-Min Cheong at the University of Kansas Center for Research. Dr. Lewis will be the key personnel driving the ecological analyses while also working closely with collaborator Jacob Model of Stanford University to develop a comprehensive database of social and ecological data, called the Community Response Inventory (CRI). Dr. Lewis and collaborators will then develop statistical models to assess the association between the presence of local nonprofits, density of those networks, and how the ecological health of the system drives the ability of nonprofits, and thus communities, to respond to oil spills.

Specifically, the planned research uses environmental data in combination with community-level social and economic data to generate novel insights on community impact from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. It fills an important gap in social capital and community resilience literature by bringing attention to organizations and nonprofits, and helps develop community skills to mobilize and coordinate. This project will also provide funding for an undergraduate research assistant at SMCM to support Dr. Lewis with her research. Dr. Lewis transitioned from a visiting assistant professor position to a tenure-track assistant professor position in July 2017 and will continue this research into 2018.

Research reported in this article was supported by the Gulf Research Program of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine under award number: 200007629.