Hundreds of Wesleyan and greater Middletown community members gathered under sunny skies on Saturday, October 26, 2024, at Long Lane Farm, to enjoy Pumpkin Fest 2024, which featured live music, free food, a pie-eating contest, tours of the farm, craft activities, and vendors. Check out photos, by Laurie Kenney and Sophie Jager, below!
where on earth symposium explores agency and improvisation
On November 2, the Wesleyan community gathered in Exley 150 for Agency and Improvisation: Exploring Modes of Individual and Collective Power to Make Change, the Bailey COE’s 21st Annual Robert F. Schumann Where on Earth Are We Going symposium.
chamberlain ’26 studies cougar conservation
Every year, the Bailey COE awards fellowships to fund research opportunities for Wesleyan students across all majors and class years. Most recently, the COE awarded nearly 40 summer fellowships. One of those fellows, Milo Chamberlain ’26, is a junior majoring in environmental studies and government. He called in to the Bailey COE from his semester abroad in Arusha, Tanzania, to tell us about his summer researching a subpopulation of the endangered North American cougar on a potential development site in Los Angeles’s Verdugo Mountains.
food justice, solidarity in new london and beyond
On Monday, October 7, Wesleyan students, faculty, and members of the broader community broke with their lunch routines to attend “Food Justice & Solidarity in New London, CT, sponsored by a grant from the Robert F. Schumann Foundation to the Schumann Institute of the Bailey College of the Environment. There were about 20 Wesleyan students, staff and faculty, as well as community members in attendance. The hour-long workshop was facilitated by Julie R. Jacome-Garay (Co-Director of Operations and Programming) and Chloë Nuñez (Youth Program Manager) of FRESH New London, with the aim of spreading awareness about the organization’s food justice work. Despite its short duration, the workshop was packed full of informative and engaging content. Following group introductions, we got to know Julie and Chloë, learned in-depth about FRESH’s work, and heard stories from Wesleyan food justice interns who were placed at FRESH this summer.
george ’26 spends summer exploring food systems
Every year, the Bailey COE awards fellowships to fund research opportunities for Wesleyan students across all majors and class years. Most recently, the COE awarded nearly 40 summer fellowships, including sociology and psychology double major Lacy George ’26, who spent her summer farming in Northern Italy and working at her local food bank in Seattle to conduct a narrative-based analysis of how food production, distribution, and waste is structured in small Italian and American communities. Her research aims to understand food justice solutions at the local level to potentially replicate at a national level.
think tank explores agency: affect and action
Every academic year, the COE invites a small group of Wesleyan faculty and undergraduate students, plus a noted scholar from outside the University, to gather together for the Think Tank: a yearlong discussion of a critical environmental issue. The 2024-2025 Bailey COE Think Tank feature Sonia Sultan, Alan M. Dachs Professor of Science, Professor of Biology and Environmental Studies; Justine Quijada, Associate Professor of Religion, Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, and Environmental Studies; and Garry Bertholf, Assistant Professor of African American Studies, alongside undergraduates Maryam Badr ’25, Hannah Podol ’25, and Nic Galleno, ’25. These University fellows will be joined by the 2024-2025 Menakka and Essel Bailey ‘66 Distinguished Visiting Scholar Roxy Coss: Jazz saxophonist and Founding President of the Women In Jazz Organization, as well as a Grammy-award winning musician, composer, educator and activist.
meet our envs class of 2025!
Environmental studies (ENVS) is the academic component of the Bailey COE. Offered as a linked major or minor, ENVS current and past students hail from almost every single department and program Wesleyan has to offer: from government, art, and chemistry to economics, English, and earth and environmental sciences to film studies, sociology, and biology. Meet some of our 40 ENVS class of 2025 majors below!
grammy-winner coss joins coe think tank
What brought you to the Bailey COE, and what kinds of contributions are you hoping to make here?
I’m officially here for the Bailey COE Think Tank, continuing the tradition to include cross-disciplinary contributors. This year the theme is agency, and the three faculty fellows wanted an artist or musician to complete the team. There’s a biologist [Sonia Sultan], an anthropologist and religion scholar [Justine Quijada], and an African American studies and literature scholar [Garry Bertholf] on the faculty.
workshop highlights bipoc farming in ct
On September 26, the Bailey College of the Environment welcomed farmer and educator Liz Guerra to lead a workshop on BIPOC Farming: Farming with an Intersectional Lens. This was the latest installment in the land justice workshop series “Tending the Soil: Towards Land Justice in CT,” cosponsored by Wesleyan University’s Bailey College of the Environment and the People’s Saturday School. The event aimed to educate and spread awareness about the struggles of BIPOC farmers with land access and systemic racism, while bringing together a mix of Wesleyan students and community members from various organizations across the state. Liz runs SEAmarron Farmstead in Danbury, where she cultivates hemp and many types of vegetables with her partner Hector “Freedom” Gerardo. Hailing from Queens, New York, Liz is a full spectrum doula/birth worker, social justice advocate, and farmer. In addition to her work as an activist and independent farmer, Liz is an Adjunct Faculty in sociology at the University of Connecticut – Stamford.
podol ’25 finds inspiration connecting to the land
Every year, the Bailey COE awards fellowships to fund summer research opportunities for Wesleyan students across all majors and class years. Most recently, the COE awarded more than 40 fellowships to Wes students. Hanah Podol ‘25 is an environmental studies and anthropology major. For her summer project funded by the Bailey COE, she connected with the land through farming and writing.
bery ’21 studies city-level climate planning
Sanya Bery ‘21 graduated from Wes with majors in government and environmental studies. She is currently a graduate candidate in environmental justice, sustainable development, and urban planning at the University of Michigan.
As an environmental studies student at Wesleyan, how did your academic and extracurricular experiences shape your decision to pursue graduate studies in environmental justice and urban planning?
The Bailey College of the Environment was such a unique program; it approached environmental issues through a justice-oriented lens, which isn’t common for undergrad programs. If not for the COE, I might have felt hesitant about pursuing this path because environmental studies can feel so focused on pure science and conservation. My thesis project with Professor Haddad, which analyzed the ambitious aspects of Middletown’s Climate Action Plan, prepared me well for graduate school.