2024 GRANT RECIPIENTS
Perceptions of Light in the Arctic Environment (Final Stage)
Elena Adasheva-Klein, Department of Anthropology
My short-term ethnographic project explores the human perception of light in the Arctic environment during the polar day on an expedition cruise. Through conversational interviews an informal discussions with passengers and crew, we delved into individuals’ observations, experiences, and contemplations about light in the polar landscape, as well as how they articulate their perceptions. The fieldwork for this project took place in August 2023.The environmental humanities grant will partially cover the final stage of this work, including transcriptions of interviews, organizing and analyzing data, and preparing the presentation of findings for public outreach.
Memories of Contamination
Daniel Blokh, Yale College
Though the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster is well-documented in the media, we rarely hear firsthand accounts of the catastrophe. My short film, composed of interviews conducted in Ukrainian diaspora centers such as New York’s Brighton Beach and Ukrainian Village, documents the memories of Ukrainians who lived through Chernobyl. By centering interviewees’ concrete experiences, the film captures the intersection between human lives and ecological systems. Furthermore, by highlighting the role of Moscow’s negligence and obfuscation in compounding the disaster, the film comments upon the human and environmental toll of Russia’s contemporary war on Ukraine and the ways imperialism exacerbates climate catastrophe.
The Peyote Coordinate: Considering the Status of the “Native American Spirituality” Religion in Prisons, Ceremonial Land Reconnection, and Cactus Conservation Challenges
Estrella V. Castillo, History of Science and History of Medicine (HSHM)
Global interest in North American peyote cactus therapeutic and religious practices surged in the past century, outpacing natural regrowth and conservation efforts. Divergent political histories among peyote observers exacerbate a perceived “disconnect” between interested groups and habitat needs. Nevertheless, peyote, particularly among displaced Native Americans and the Indigenous diaspora, has served as a “coordinate” for Land-based traditions and reaffirmations of indigeneity, even if landless. Indeed, incarcerated individuals, notably constrained, report finding relief from their compulsory disconnection from land and peoples in the spiritualized land practices that ceremonies sustain. Despite legal protections in some states, hindrances persist for ceremonial facilitators and conservationists in serving ceremonial prison networks. Based on interviews with facilitators, conservationists, and incarcerated individuals, this project examines the status of “Native American Spirituality” in prisons, participant barriers, and avenues for religious rights and conservation advocacy.
Searing Sands & Silent Grazing: Nomadic Life in a Changing Climate
Zaya Delgerjargal, Yale School of the Environment
When I was five, my grandmother milked her cows twice daily. Now, it’s my aunt who tends to the cows. The only difference is: she milks them just once. The reason behind this shift lies in the impact of climate change, which has led to a decrease in milk and meat production. The story unfolds in Bayankhongor, Mongolia, where the temperature rise is twice the global average and icy cold snaps have dramatically increased. My documentary aims to encapsulate these scientific findings within the context of an ordinary nomadic family, who will serve as a microcosm, symbolizing the physical, spiritual, and emotional experiences of the nomadic population. I aim through this documentary not to tell a story myself but to let Mongolians tell their own story through oral history.
Water over Nickel: A Documentary Showing Us What We Have To Lose
Allie Douma, Yale School of the Environment
My project highlights the work of advocates, farmers, and citizens of northern Minnesota working to stop the Talon Nickel mine in Tamarack. I will focus on how people use the water and natural environment to show that the environment and their cultures are worth protecting. Time and time again Native folk and farmers are forced to prove that their land and their culture are worth protecting. As the Biden administration pushes for an electric future with a focus on critical minerals in the United States more communities will be faced with the question of how they can protect themselves.
Conversations in the Environmental Humanities
Abigail Fields, French Department
“Conversations in the Agricultural Humanities,” constitutes a series of events that welcome thinkers that we believe to be at the cutting edge of the cultural study of agriculture. While many of the invited speakers are academics, we are also interested in inviting artists, organizers, and farmers to join in order to think about the ways agricultural land and labor is represented in popular culture, past and present. These events will be formatted as informal conversations between two people at a time, and will be held in public spaces (i.e., not university settings) in order to render more accessible these discussions, which we believe to be urgent in the face of climate catastrophe, violence and injustice resulting from environmental colonialism, and rifts between notions of society and “nature”.
Ecological Disobedience Cartography in NY
Alberto Martinez Garcia, Yale School of Architecture
Ecological Disobedience Cartography in NY investigates ecological systems that have resisted human domestication within the built environment. Through the documentation of three case studies, I will explore ecological acts of resistance that challenge the myth of human control over nature in urban contexts. The project will be developed in collaboration with Latent Ecologies, a NYC-based collective I co-founded that advocates for symbiotic relationships between humans and nature in an urban context. The resultant cartographies will be presented in a traveling exhibition throughout NYC, engaging with diverse local communities and activist groups.
The Yale Environmentalist
Molly Hill, Yale College
The Yale Environmentalist is a student publication in its fourth year. Founded shortly before the pandemic, the Environmentalist is still a new publication, and is a project run by the Yale Student Environmental Coalition. So far, it has published irregularly and in print only once. We aim to expand the magazine to publishing regularly (once per semester), recruit a larger staff of editors and staff writers, connect with environmental writers at universities beyond Yale, and host environmental writing events throughout the year.
Global Environment in Early Modernity
John Hoffmeyer, Comparative Literature, and Taylor Yoonji Kang, Comparative Literature and Early Modern Studies
As Robert Watson argued in his seminal monograph Back to Nature, many key problems in contemporary consideration of environmental crises – scale, perspective, the human and its place in broader ecosystems – find their roots in forms of environmental thinking during early modernity. Through this project, we want to explore comparative, global approaches to “environmental thinking” in a variety of media and in diverse contexts. By broadening our purview beyond conventional Western frameworks through an intentionally diverse symposium at Yale, we hope to think through problems of cultural specificity and contingency in how we shape our understanding of the world we inhabit.
Explain It Like I’m Nine
Claire Hungerford and Elise Limon, Yale School of Art
Explain it Like I’m Nine is a project to produce a series of short publications working with a cross-section of scholars in the Environmental Humanities at Yale to distill some part of their research, critically and tenderly, into short illustrated stories. Whereas academic knowledge is typically funneled into papers, journals, and lectures, this project is aimed at the most ‘diverse and lay public’ – children. In the first phase of the project, we will produce and illustrate three storybooks, referencing one scholar’s work per book. A series of local readings will be held at the New Haven Public Library and Possible Futures bookstore.
Changing Environments: Climate Change and Culture in Varanasi, India
Dominik Juling, Yale School of the Environment
For my summer research project in Varanasi, India, in June, July and August, I will ethnographically investigate the interactions between environmental and climatic changes and society and its diverse communities. The summer months in Varanasi are characterized by the transition from the dry to the wet season. As a passionate hobby photographer, I strive to capture images of how extreme weather interacts with ancient cultural and spiritual traditions. This more creative side project is only loosely connected to my main academic summer research project. The goal of the project is a photo exhibition on the Yale Campus.
Fostering Community by Redefining Waste: The Newhallville Geodesic Dome Project
Paloma Lenz, Yale College
The COVID-19 pandemic magnified the impact of redlining in New Haven’s Newhallville neighborhood, exacerbating challenges such as limited natural spaces and community disconnection. To respond to these injustices, my team, Plastic Nexus of EcoSocial Thought, will collaborate with Neighborhood Housing Services of New Haven (NHS) to construct a geodesic dome as an art installation at Shepard Street Community Garden. The dome will redefine conventional notions of waste by using repurposed plastic and “invasive” plant species as construction materials. We intend to create opportunities for residents to strengthen ties to each other and their environment by renewing an urban green space.
Lamenting the Loss of Creations with Episcopal Bishops
Kara Lyn Moran, Yale School of the Environment
I will be conducting a lament writing workshop and interviews with Episcopal Bishops in response to their emotions related to the climate crisis in their local communities. This workshop will give a space to discuss the weight that being a leader in a community can bring in response to the climate crisis. We will then discuss what bishops are doing in their local communities to respond to environmental problems. I will conduct more in-depth interviews for a better understanding of the landscape of the lamentation and how religious leadership and theological ideas are being affected by the climate crisis.
Resting Land
Adam Nussbaum, Yale College
Today, the United States military occupies about one-third of the surface of Guam (Guåhan). Thinking from the island’s two main industries, defense and tourism, this project investigates leisure architecture from the postwar period before Guam opened to civilian travel, 1944–1962. A multimedia method of satellite imaging, photography, interviews, and writing will attempt to record the traces of militarized urbanization in the island’s landscape. In studying the land, we inevitably encounter buried histories—like the farms underneath a Navy golf course. As histories suggest futures, these sites might urge us to remember and imagine a demilitarized, agricultural, sovereign Guåhan.
Breadfruit in the Marquesas Islands: Exploring Climate Resilience and Food Sovereignty through an Indigenous Cookbook
Lily O’Sullivan, Yale College
The Marquesas Islands, French Polynesia, has a rich Indigenous culture surrounding breadfruit, a staple crop. This summer, I will create a recipe book, highlighting five to six Indigenous Marquesan dishes made with breadfruit. It will document the preparation of these dishes, as well as the cultural context of meals, festivities and stories enjoyed with breadfruit. Pictures, captions and reflections will accompany the recipes, with all materials written in English, French and Marquesan. I will stay on Tahuata with a family that I became close with in the summer of 2022, while working on an archeological dig.
Ruidosa, Texas: Stories of Movement and Matter
Rebecca Lea Potts, Religious Studies
This project will build an interactive oral history and photo archive website with GIS maps documenting the environmental, architectural, migration, and religious histories of Ruidosa, Texas. Ruidosa is now a ghost town along the banks of the Rio Grande. The website will trace overlapping and contradictory relationships with water and dirt enacted by the Indigenous, Mexican, Anglo, and Tejano inhabitants of this slice of borderland. This project will create a record of the change over time in land use along the border as influenced by past religious and engineering practices.
Saunter - Another look and listen at everyday nature
Shubhi Sharma, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Did you know there is a White Oak tree in the Marsh Gardens that is believed to be older than the university itself? Right off Hillhouse Lane, an enormous turkey tail mushroom, boasting of unique medicinal properties grows. In the winter, hundreds of oyster shells wash up on Long Island Sound shores. In the Spring, thousands of birds migrate through campus. While Yale is widely acknowledged for its intellectual and cultural significance, a variety of organisms coexist with us on this campus. We aim to transform how students perceive and connect with everyday space at Yale through a multisensory exhibition of visual and musical compositions that highlight the small natural beauty in common spaces that we often miss in our hurried lives. We hope this will allow busy students to pause, reflect, and reconnect with nature all around us.
Extractions
Santana Vannarath, Yale College
Extractions is a dance concert that explores the human experience under climate change. The production features seven original pieces that contain research-based choreography set to music by Beyoncé, Harry Styles, Nina Simone, and other popular artists. Ultimately, this interdisciplinary project aims to address climate change through dance in new and entertaining ways. In undertaking this, I hope to better understand one, the role of climate change in popular culture and two, how traditional academic research and artistic practices can inform each other. Extractions will run in the Lighten Theater from April 5th-6th, 2024.
Documenting Nuclear Imperialism in the Algerian Sahara
Hao Wang, Yale School of Architecture
Between 1960 and 1966, the French colonial regime detonated 17 nuclear bombs in the Algerian Sahara. These detonations resulted in the leakage of radioactive materials that still remain in the area to this day. However, little of this operation is known by the public due to the concealment of the French state. I propose compiling a web archive documenting and piecing together fragments of evidence from oral histories sources to juxtapose with the French ‘official’ archive. Upon completion of the research and interviews, I will collaborate with a graphic design student at the MFA program to design and construct the website.
New Haven, Revisited
Kevin Yang and Fany Kuzmova, Yale School of Architecture
This project is a continuation of the New Haven, Revisited project that was funded by Yale Environmental Humanities in 2023. Over the past year we have conducted interviews and workshops with New Haven residents and high schools, revealing insights into youth spaces in a post-renewal environment, oral histories of lost community spaces, and mechanisms for community revitalization. With our workshop series wrapping up, we turn our focus toward representing these stories to policymakers and the broader public. We aim to achieve this through a publication and an interactive exhibit at the New Haven City Hall and the New Haven Free Public Library (NHFPL).
Inhabiting Cracks: Documenting Urban Vernacular Memorials
Lucy Ruxi Zuo, Yale College
This project explores vernacular memorials – sites of remembrance spontaneously ritualized or built by individuals or communities for mourning or remembrance – by creating a multisensory archive of oral histories, objects, and drawings. The research focuses on Hong Kong and Sarajevo, where citizens occupy hidden or informal urban spaces to reclaim their histories and resist collective amnesia. Through site analysis and documentation, the project collaborates with local artists and collectives to map memory-making practices in danger of disappearance, from graffiti to indigenous performances. The final exhibition and archive contribute to the global conversation on post-traumatic landscapes and public memory by spotlighting grassroots memorials.
2023 GRANT RECIPIENTS
Translational Reconciliation
Haysun Choi, Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology
Knowledge is sensorially, spatially, and temporally variable, and so the dialectic disseminating such knowledge collects and resonantes. ‘Translational Reconciliation’, an original Artist’s Book printed in 2019-2021, studies life and lifeforms and their relative environments through iterative and textural imagery at different scales. I will use this grant to create a physical enclosure and digitize ‘Translational Reconciliation’ so that it can be shared outside of special collections spaces and for interdisciplinary interaction.
Black Homesteads of the New Deal
Austin Ehrhardt, Yale School of Architecture
Drawing upon a wealth of historical documents at the Library of Congress and the National Archives—including architectural drawings, textual records, and an extensive collection of photography—I propose to compile a web archive documenting the built and unbuilt Black homesteads of the New Deal. I will then interview scholars and community historians on the projects’ significance in challenging racialized property regimes, juxtaposing the interview transcriptions with digitized archival materials. Finally, I will enlist the assistance of a Graphic Design MFA student from the Yale School of Art to design and construct a website.
Following the Seeds Savers: Biocultural Conservation by Ethnic Minorities in Southwest China
Xiyao Fu, Yale School of the Environment
As the borderland between China and Southeast Asia, Yunnan is the nexus of biodiversity and ethnic diversity with its subtropic climate and mountainous ecosystems. Over 25 major ethnic groups have cultivated diverse traditional crops and native plants in a mosaic landscape. To celebrate the traditional ecological knowledge of minority farmers, I will produce a video web series during my ethnographic fieldwork in Yunnan. Following indigenous seed savers, culinary artisans, and home gardeners from the field to the kitchen, I will explore their multisensory engagement with plants in both daily practice and cultural rituals. The bilingual video web series will showcase the urgency and grassroot actions of bicultural conservation for Chinese audience and beyond.
Unhomelike
Charlotte Hecht, American Studies Program
Unhomelike is a cyanotype photoseries and accompanying personal essay. Using my great-grandfather’s memoir as a guide—which describes his involvement in planning nuclear tests such as the infamous Castle Bravo detonation in the Marshall Islands in 1954—I will make cyanotype prints of the places he grew up and writes evocatively about. The chemical process of cyanotype printing results in an image that is tinted with the synthetic pigment Prussian Blue; Prussian Blue pills are also used to treat radiation poisoning. Reflecting on this resonance, this project hopes to be a mediation of violent history: to make images of home in one place to think about the destruction of home in another, and to consider the toxic and affective legacies of the US nuclear testing program through the lens of personal history.
Sharing Nature Stories on the Tibetan Plateau
Junhan Hu, Yale School of the Environment
During the summer research in 2023, I plan to carry out a series of storytelling campaigns with Tibetan indigenous people, including collective storytelling and poetry reading. The main theme of these storytellings will be the human-nature relationships between Tibetan nomads/monks and plants, wild animals, sacred mountain deities, and other nonhumans in Tibetan cosmology. I will collaborate with two familiar Tibetan indigenous conservation NGOs, which are all dedicated to protecting nature through traditional culture (Tibetan Buddhism and others) and have religious leaders who are experienced in storytelling. Some stories will be represented in natural education for local children.
Why We Melt
Lauren Maxwell, Yale Divinity School
“Why We Melt” is a public theological response to the climate crisis. This one-time event will carve out intersectional space for the New Haven community to acknowledge the ecological loss and devastation shaping our lives today. As we express the anxiety and grief related to the climate emergency, we will also imagine a way forward together. Through a combination of interdisciplinary arts and humanities, “Why We Melt” will explore the generative power found when communities hold grief and commitment side by side. The program will frame climate action as a moral imperative rather than a political talking point, and it will highlight an organization addressing local climate issues. This event will aim to help people find solidarity amidst strife and interlocking forms of injustice. From that place, may change begin to sow its seeds.
Horizons after Tourism
George Papamatthaiakis, Yale School of Architecture
Throughout the global sunbelt, tourism orders landscapes in ways that are not only intense and monocultural but also “sticky”—they condition and capture spatial imagination—a phenomenon latent and underexplored. This project focuses on the case of the Cyclades islands in the Mediterranean, exploring remapped and plural spatial and geographical imaginations beyond the fabled tropes of tourism. It does so through two parallel and interconnected endeavors: On the one hand, an oral history/ futures workshop and reading installation in Therasia island, and on the other a publication reporting on the workshop. Both are to be organized in collaboration with local residents, researchers, and collectives.
Growing Maize, Crossing Boundaries
Sandra Amezcua Rocha, Yale College
Maize carries the history and identity of Indigenous people across the Americas. Indigenous people selectively bred teosinte, the ancient grass ancestor of today’s dozens of edible maize varieties. Today, many varieties are at risk of extinction because of industrial agriculture and land appropriation. This significantly affects Indigenous people’s ability to grow specifically adapted corn varieties that reflect generations of knowledge and relations to nutrition, soil compositions, rain patterns, etc. To understand and support maize conservation, it is critical to look at maize cultures across individual Indigenous ethnic groups. Moreover, analyzing traditional maize food systems, can add to the scientific and Indigenous narratives surrounding corn´s biodiversity and conservation.
New Haven Brownfields Opportunities Flyer
Elihu Rubin, Yale School of Architecture / American Studies
I am proposing a collaborative project between myself and students in the Yale School of Architecture and the Yale School of Environment to research, design, and print the New Haven Brownfield Opportunities Flyer (working title), a broadsheet newspaper intended for public dissemination (through the public libraries, local museums, public spaces, etc.). The goal is a piece of public scholarship intended to stimulate awareness and interest in post-industrial brownfield sites (from former gas stations to sprawling industrial locations); their historical legacies; their current circumstances; and their potential futures, in a playful and interactive format.
New Haven, Revisited: An Anthology
Kevin Yang, Yale School of Architecture
Through a series of workshops hosted in partnership with local community groups, city departments, and high schools, this project will showcase stories from residents that humanize the lingering effects of redlining and urban renewal that shape the everyday experiences of New Haven residents. These stories take the form of a book that spatializes issues of the city and invites community leaders to co-author chapters on their own projects that respond to systemic injustice. Equal parts guidebook, oral history, and urban ethnography, this book serves as an anthology of hope that encourages a radical re-imagining of a future New Haven.
Building an Archive of Environmental Activism at Yale
Sebastian Duque and Madeleine Zaritsky, Yale College
This project aims to explore the history of environmental activism on Yale’s campus through the creation of a library archive that contains materials from the Yale Student Environmental Coalition (founded in 1986) and all the groups that have been associated with it over the years. Through engagement with the current decades-old documents, photos, posters, and more currently in YSEC’s office, we hope to encourage future research on environmental activism through the creation of a physical and oral materials collection, and fostering environmental education and activism on-campus by showcasing these materials in a final public exhibition. We hope for this collection to be a jumping-off point for further archival materials and research on student environmental activism outside of YSEC.
2022 GRANT RECIPIENTS
The Waveform Garden
Camille Chang and Geovanni Barrios, Yale College
The Waveform Garden is an outdoor art installation based on Japanese karesansui gravel garden traditions, with an additional focus on the material cultures of people Indigenous to Connecticut and New Haven. The space represents an intersection between the aesthetic and utility of outdoor art spaces, and seeks to be a way for students and community members to form a deeper connection with the outdoors. Through study and observation of Buddhist gravel wave raking rituals, the garden serves as a place to recreate water in stone, make the intangible real, and thereby promote introspection about permanence, destruction, humanity, the environment, and the connections between them all.
Retracing Adirondack Faces Film
Sawyer Cresap, Yale School of the Environment
In 1986, the Adirondack Museum commissioned a book of portraits known as Adirondack Faces (1991) to illuminate the lives and livelihoods of 50 Adirondack residents. 30 years later, the Retracing Adirondack Faces documentary revisits the people, places, traditional crafts, and occupations originally featured, and explores a new generation of Adirondackers’ stories through film. In addition to screenings and discussions across the Adirondacks and Yale, the film will be accompanied by a standing website to engage broad audiences in the urgent topics and ideas it raises.
Sustainable Architecture Roundtable
Benjamin Derlan, Yale School of Architecture
The Yale School of Architecture (YSoA) teaches students the basics of environmental design in the core graduate curriculum. In individual studio work though, students are working alone and might have questions in regards to sustainable design strategies, or wish to push their work to a higher level of ecological integration. Acting as a weekly group ‘pin up,’ the proposed roundtable will foster a community of environmentally-focused designers to help forward each other’s work, and the field as a whole. This weekly gathering will be flexible enough for students to bring work from both design practices and writing or theory practices, and thus create a vital exchange between the M.Arch, MED, and PhD programs.
Home/stake: Re-Mining the Rural West
Cloe Dickson, Yale School of the Environment
The last silver mine in Creede, Colorado closed in 1985, yet the industry’s both toxic and celebrated legacies endure well into the present day. For decades, residents have worked together to find local, community-driven solutions to reducing acid mine drainage and improve water quality in Willow Creek, a tributary of the Rio Grande. Today, there is mounting pressure to reopen the silver mine, both to create jobs and to pioneer new paths in alternative water treatment practices. This three-part podcast series documents the people and organizations in Creede who are navigating the risks, and opportunities, that the return of mining means for this mountain headwaters community.
Kosmos Revisited: Translating Collective Animal Behavior into Music Theory Through Artificial Intelligence and Technology for Wildlife Research
Diego Ellis Soto, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
To communicate the lives and sounds of animals, and the threats they face by warming climates and human activities, this project combines artificial intelligence, natural history and musical theory. Jointly with musicians, sound engineers, biologists and artists, Ellis Soto has created new ways of expressing animal behavior into musical patterns and artistic expressions. This project will be displayed in the form of two art galleries at Yale (CCAM and TSAI) and involve New Haven youth. In addition, planned interdisciplinary dialogue across the arts, humanities and sciences will pave new ways of representing nature and its unique beauty.
Mill Dams of the Chiques: Landowner Perspectives
Sam Feibel, Yale School of the Environment
Pennsylvania’s Chiques Creek Watershed once contained at least 56 mill dams. Today, all but ten have breached. Many conservationists want these remaining dams removed. Yet, scientists working in the watershed argue there is a disconnect between the Commonwealth’s pollutant reduction efforts and the potential release of sediment and nutrients trapped for centuries behind dams. What’s missing in this conversation is the perspective and knowledge of landowners. Through interviews and visual storytelling with digital and film photography, this project will produce a long-form story that explores the history, scale, and contemporary challenges of an overlooked land use legacy.
The Social-Ecological Landscape of Makgadikgadi, Botswana
Dylan Feldmeier and Kaggie Orrick, Yale School of the Environment
The proposed project will use Esri’s Story Maps and an in-person mixed media gallery in both New Haven, CT, USA and Rakops, CT8, Botswana to provide an interactive experience of the human-cattle-wildlife interactions across a human-designated area in Botswana. Users will be able to interact with the web material to see the spatial and temporal shifts across the landscape through the ecological, cultural, and economic relationships between wildlife, humans, and cattle. Voice records, photographs, videos, and short essays will be displayed in conjunction with wildlife abundance and distribution maps, and cattle movement visualizations.
fSTS @ Yale (Feminist Science & Technology Studies at Yale)
Elaina Foley & Akio Ho, Yale College
fSTS @ Yale envisions practical, creative interventions into the landscape of STEM at Yale by supporting the development of a collective of students interested in a more inclusive, diverse, and justice-oriented way of engaging in science and technology studies (STS). They aim to raise the profile of feminist science studies at Yale in order to support and engage students who may be questioning some of the underlying or fundamental principles of what it means to “do science.” fSTS @ Yale is a space for students to work through and explore ethical problems through lunchtime discussion meetings, student symposiums, invited STS speakers, and more.
What is graphic design made of?
Miguel Gaydosh, Yale School of Art
This initiative seeks to understand graphic design’s role in environmental crises and potentials by critically examining the discipline’s material ecology, pedagogy and related practices. As a collaborative discipline, graphic design facilitates the translation of information, concerned not only with communicating ideas but their very shape and the vessels through which they’re delivered. However, it overwhelmingly supports assumptions of endless consumption—anthropocentric agendas which have proven untenable within the bounds of our planet’s ecology. Through dialogue and diagramming, this project will research the inextricable ties between the industry of graphic design and our global ecosystems—infrastructures built upon flawed myths and economic systems.
“Old Smokey: Justice Deferred, Nuisance Heard” - A Case Study on Coconut Grove, Jim Crow Power Structures, and Environmental Justice
AJ Hudson, Yale Law School and Yale School of the Environment
Under Jim Crow laws and sundown curfew enforcement, Black communities in Miami experienced diminished agency and power, which enabled the legal placement of a hazardous trash incinerator in a historic Black neighborhood for seventy years. The trial that finally shut down the dangerously polluting Old Smokey did not feature any testimony from Black people, instead centering the incidental complaints of wealthy white communities from the few days the wind blew in the wrong direction. This project attempts to center the voices of living Black West Grove residents to correct that injustice, by reimagining the trial with their testimony centered during proceedings, and reimagining the remedies that the state could have given had these voices been heard.
A Climate of Anxiety
Benjamin Stern and Sawyer Cresap, Yale School of the Environment
This short documentary investigates how Yale School of the Environment students experience climate change anxiety. Through a series of video interviews, conversations, and situational scenes, the film will uncover the hidden stressors impacting the people who devote their careers to fighting the existential crisis of our generation. This film also explores the methods employed by these individuals to cope with the challenges inherent in working amidst a climate of uncertainty and desperation.
New England Fibershed Demonstration Exhibit at the Dudley Farm Museum
Maria Trumpler, Program in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
The grant will allow attendance at the “Fleece to Fulling” workshop at the Marshfield School of Weaving in Vermont from May 2-27, 2022. The Marshfield School of Weaving has the largest collection of working looms and spinning wheels from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the US. This workshop will use historic methods of transforming fleece to cleaned and carded wool, to spun yarn, to naturally dyed yarn, to woven fabric. These new skills will be used to set up a demonstration exhibit at the Dudley Farm museum in North Guilford, CT, that shows how cloth was made in the New England fibershed.
2021 GRANT RECIPIENTS
Talking Story: How Hawaii’s Modern Aquaculturists Discovered a Solution to the Future in the Past
Grace Cajski, Yale College
Talking Story will include an essay and a series of profiles on Hawaiian aquaculturists who are harnessing ancient fishponds to restore the islands’ ecological balance. The project aims to capture and preserve the knowledge of the aging aquaculturists, which may otherwise be lost. In addition to written work, Talking Story will include photographs and video interviews, which will be compiled on a website, accessible to broad, interested audiences. These interviews also will contribute to a growing archive at the Center for Oral History at the University of Hawaii. In addition to its documentary mission, this project aims to offer solutions, illuminate challenges, and celebrate Hawaiian culture.
Design + Decay
Katie Colford, Yale School of Architecture
Design + Decay takes the form of a website that will be used to document and address decay in architecture. The website will present case studies that demonstrate the productive opportunities decay may offer for design. In addition to the website, the project includes a podcast created from a series of related interviews conducted by Katie Colford. Across these media, Design + Decay aims to recover decay from being seen as a sign of building failure and ruin. Instead, mutability and deterioration may be—and indeed, must be—reclaimed as productive potentials for architecture facing ever-pressing ecological, climatic and social demands.
Dwight Healthy and Just Neighborhood Web Pilot Project
Andrei Harwell, Yale School of Architecture
The Dwight Healthy and Just Neighborhood Pilot is a collaboration between the Yale Urban Design Workshop, community leaders in New Haven’s Dwight neighborhood, and Yale faculty and students. The project will research, design and deploy a pilot Dwight Healthy and Just Neighborhood web portal, which will provide a “thick” multimedia environmental-justice-history based portrait of the neighborhood. The historical portrait will be paired with contemporary, real-time environmental monitoring data at the neighborhood scale, accessible to community members, local educators, school children, and researchers, as a tool for community-based advocacy. This web portal is envisioned as the pilot for a larger smart and adaptive neighborhood monitoring and planning interface, one that can support ongoing, grass-roots planning and organizing efforts promoting environmental and racial justice, sustainability and resilience in Dwight.
Cedar Point Park: An Experiment in Graphic Narrative
Anna Hill, Graduate School of Art and Sciencess
Cedar Point Park is a hand-drawn graphic narrative that explores a deep history of a small place: Cedar Point Park, a compact sitting park located in West Philadelphia. With the help of local historians, residents, community groups, botanists, and geologists, the project presents a multifaceted set of stories about how the space has changed over long spans of time. It also investigates the variety of interpersonal and interspecies relationships that the park affords today. The project experiments with graphic storytelling techniques in order to communicate environmental issues with a wide range of audiences in creative and accessible ways.
Dreaming Animals
Meredith Miller and MJ Millington, Beinecke Library
Dreaming Animals is the result of an award-winning collaboration begun during COVID-19 lockdown in the spring of 2020. Miller prints images of endangered animals from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library’s digital collections, and then re-photographs them in scenes she creates with household objects. Millington then uses the photograph to write a poem exploring the relationship between animals and humans. Text and image are joined together to create the Dreaming Animals series of broadsides. This project will be presented as an installation at the Yale Health Center. Large-format prints will be tied together through the addition of decals featuring repeated motifs such as animals, text, and patterns. The project will also welcome audience participation, providing children visiting the exhibit with their own decal to adhere with the images.
Mapping Grounds for Reparations in the Jaraguá Indigenous land, São Paulo, Brazil
Laura Pappalardo (Yale School of Architecture), Flávia Assumpção de Godoy Bueno (FAU-USP), Miguel Gaydosh (Yale School of Art), and Nick Massarelli (Yale School of Art)
Mapping Grounds for Reparations proposes a collaboration with Guarani communities in the Jaraguá Peak, in São Paulo, Brazil. The Guarani people have been articulating several initiatives that increase environmental security in São Paulo. This project will create instruments that contribute to Guarani initiatives to increase public awareness about Guarani land rights in the Jaraguá landscape and to preserve the remaining Atlantic Forest within the region. The project team will produce a website and a publication articulating debates surrounding case studies on State Parks shared governance and awareness of infrastructural constructions’ impacts that have historically encroached upon Atlantic Forest and Guarani territory in São Paulo.
Restorative Radio
Sylvia Ryerson, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Central Appalachia today is one of the most concentrated regions of rural prison growth nationwide. Many of these facilities are built on land formerly mined for coal. For over two decades, the Calls from Home radio show at the Appalshop media arts center has been broadcasting messages from family members to their loved ones incarcerated far from home. In an intimate portrait of rural prison expansion, this short documentary demonstrates how families are using public airwaves to transcend prison walls and forge solidarities between the urban and rural communities most impacted by the overlapping processes of incarceration, extraction, toxicity and abandonment.
Environmental Performances in Russia and Eastern Europe
Aniko Szucs, Russian, East European, and Eurasian Program
Environmental Performances in Eastern Europe and Russia will be part of the online platform, Cultures of Resistance, currently under construction, that both builds a digital archive and fosters a virtual network of scholars, artists, and activists whose work centers on protest performances and political movements in Central and Eastern Europe and Russia. The Environmental Humanities Grant will support the development of a section of this platform that will center specifically on environmental and ecological performances. On this site, we will showcase works by artists and activists that critique the East European illiberal states’ aggressive anti-environmental ideologies and policies and envision an environmentally conscious society for the future.
The Yale Undergraduate Review of Sustainability and the Environment
Andy Xie, Yale College
The Yale Undergraduate Review of Sustainability and the Environment is an undergraduate publication centered on sustainability and environmental topics, broadly defined. The review engages with student writing ranging from long-form essays and analytical opinion pieces to environmental poetry and nature photography. With the Environmental Humanities Grant, the editorial team will develop a podcast on sustainability and environmental literature, in order to further promote environmental discourse on campus. This podcast will feature the work of current staff writers, and will provide opportunities for students to share their experiences volunteering with local environmental service organizations.
2020 GRANT RECIPIENTS
“HEMP: AN AGRICULTURAL REVIVAL”
Chelsea Jack (Department of Anthropology)
This project contributes to a series of short documentary films that Chelsea Jack is completing alongside her dissertation project. Through ethnographic fieldwork on the nascent hemp industry in New York state, this short film explores the experience of growers and producers of hemp extracts such as CBD (cannabidiol) in order to understand the process of (re)legitimization of hemp supply chains after decades of cannabis prohibition in the US.
“Reading Outside the Lines: Art and Literature on the Rocks”
Supraja Balasubramanian and Tyler Lutz (Department of Physics)
Project canceled due to Covid-19 disruption.
This project includes a series of participatory tours of New Haven and its immediate environs. Each tour will be grounded on a particular work of literature or cultural object that will be read in relation to a particular physical environment. Participants will be given time to prepare their own creative “reading” of the piece, which will be shared with the group over the course of the tour. This interactive reading experience interrogates the interior and exterior spaces of cultural artifacts, the environment itself, and the relationship between them.
“100 Years in Queens: investigating the landscape history of New York City through
sculpture”
Sally Donovan (Yale School of the Environment)
In collaboration with NYC Art in the Parks Program, this project proposes the installation of public sculptures in and around the Kissena Corridor and Alley Pond in Queens, NY. These sculptures will feature photos from the 1920s printed on transparent, recycled plastic that will allow visitors to view the current and historical landscapes simultaneously. Each photo will be accompanied by an informational plaque that describes the impact of past agriculture on contemporary forest ecology. The sculptures aim to build a sense of place and history in city parks and to increase public stewardship of urban forests in Queens.
“[Human] Nature” Podcast
Samara Brock (Yale School of the Environment), Abigail Fields (Department of French), and Caitlin Kossmann (Program in the History of Science and Medicine)
Project canceled due to Covid-19 disruption.
[Human] Nature is an Environmental Humanities podcast that attempts to shine a light on the extensive multi- and interdisciplinary work in this burgeoning field, within and outside of the frameworks of traditional Academia. The project will be released in thematic seasons of 3-5 episodes, which trace an engaging ride (via interviews, research, and storytelling) through one aspect of the Environmental Humanities and, more broadly, of our relationship to the environment as thinkers, scholars, makers humans. The first season’s theme is “Curating the Environment,” and will primarily discuss collecting and creating images of the environment in museum and archival spaces.
Yale-New Haven Community Design Workshop
Ally Soong, Kayley Estoesta, and Rasmus Schlutter (Yale College)
Project canceled due to Covid-19 disruption.
In collaboration with residents of Dixwell neighborhood, this project will support the creation and display of streetscapes recounting the story of the Dixwell Black business district. Interest in such an exhibit stems from a community-led zoning project in the neighborhood that proposes an alternative to New Haven City’s proposed rezoning ordinance. This process will allow Dixwell residents to look to the neighborhood’s past in order to imagine a vision for the future.
Performance and Outreach Program of Wayang Kulit on Environmental Issues
Maho A. Ishiguro (Department of Music)
Project canceled due to Covid-19 disruption.
This project uses Javanese shadow puppetry (wayang kulit) as an outreach and performance tool to assemble a diverse, multi-generational swath of the Yale and New Haven communities. Wayang kulit in Indonesia is often used a platform for commentary and discussion about various socio-cultural issues. This project will emphasize the connectivity between the environmental struggles of Indonesians and New Haven residents, engage the local community and integrate their voices into a critical performance and discussion about environmental issues in New Haven and Indonesia.
2020 Hadrut Educational Summer Camp
Knar Abrahamyan (Department of Music)
The Hadrut Educational Summer Camp was inaugurated in 2019 in Hadrut, located in a contested region between Armenia and Azerbaijan. This project will again provide an opportunity for 100 children to gather for a summer camp experience with a strong environmental component. Programming includes classes on ecology, in which children learn about recycling, waste management, and climate change, film screenings that raise environmental awareness and community clean-ups.
Parks, Progress, People—An Online Oral History Archive of Buffalo’s East Side and the Expressway that Was Carved Through It
Matthew L. O’Malley (Department of Anthropology)
This project presents a public web interface/website that will house the oral histories related to the development of the Kensington Expressway, a high-speed expressway that eviscerated, divided, and ultimately isolated Buffalo’s predominantly African-American East Side. This archive of oral histories will mainly consist of a series of interviews given by elders in the East Side African-American community who lived through these events (across the 1960s). These oral histories provide valuable testimonies of the once-thriving neighborhood geography before the NY 33 and reflections on community, individual, and environmental health before and after the 33.
Ezell: Ballad of a Land Man Interactive Performance and Workshops
Taiga Christie (Yale Schwarzman Center)
Using the Yale Landscape Lab as setting, this project presents an innovative, outdoor, live performance about community-level impacts of resource extraction and climate change. The performance and accompanying workshops will bring together collaborators from the Yale School of Public Health’s HAPPY Initiative, the Center for Climate Change and Health, the Schwarzman Center, School of Forestry, and Landscape Lab to experience the impact of the performing arts on environmental awareness. It will also feature a participatory, student-led performance drawing on the experience of COVID contact tracers and climate scientists, in order to create a dialogue about COVID communication and climate change communication.