Previous Environmental Humanities Grant Recipients

 

 

 

 

 

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.

 

 

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.

 

 

 

 

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.

 

 

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.

 

 

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.

 

 

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.

 

 

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.

 

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2022 GRANT RECIPIENTS

 

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.

 

 

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.

 

 

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.

 

 

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.

 

 

 

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 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.

 

 

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 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 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 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. 

 

 

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 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 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. 

 

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2020 GRANT RECIPIENTS

“HEMP: AN AGRICULTURAL REVIVAL”