This past week, I traveled to Chicago for the New Horizons in Conservation Conference. This conference brings together researchers, environmental advocates from NGOs, and undergraduate and graduate students to discuss environmental justice and collaborate on new approaches to make environmental work more equitable. I met a wide variety of environmental activists, from community leaders fighting for clean air and green space to researchers studying invasive species. On the final day of the conference, I also got to present a pilot study about gender diversity in science education.
students
cuba calls to borzekowski ’19 and canter ’19
College of Social Studies major Emma Rose Borzekowski ’19 and philosophy and feminist, gender and sexuality studies double major Selene Canter ’19 set out over winter break to research agriculture in Cuba–to learn what farming looks like in one of the few remaining socialist states. The research trip was funded by a grant from the College of the Environment.
franceschi ’19 exhibits senior thesis photos
Kudos to art & art history and environmental studies double-major Paul Franceschi ’19, who showcased his senior thesis work, “Frontcountry Principles,” as part of an exhibition at Zilkha Gallery here at Wesleyan, earlier this month.
“One of the more expected ways to engage with the environment through images might be to highlight some kind of devastation that humans have wrought upon the natural world,” says Franceschi. “In my work I’m trying to identify a more subtle but possibly just as worrying impulse: a covering-of-tracks, a hidden curation and regulation of space, a totalization of the landscape. Rather than focusing on a conflict between the natural and human worlds, in my photos I’m trying to frame a kind of virtual reality of landscape, where images of the environment are illusory, malleable, and almost uncanny.”
Franceschi is also one of four environmental studies seniors to be inducted into Wes U’s Gamma Chapater of Phi Beta Kappa this academic year. Read more about the ceremony on News@Wes.
meet our 2019-20 student think tank fellows
Each year, our COE Think Tank brings together Wes students and faculty from across the university, plus a noted outside scholar, for a yearlong conversation on a topic of vital environmental importance. This year’s focus: how humans relate to and value the non-human part of the world. Read on to discover how our three student fellows have been exploring the topic in their work.
mcleod ’19 hosts bears ears exhibit and screening
On February 22, the COE hosted a screening of the 2016 documentary short film Shash Jaa’: Bears Ears, followed by a Q&A with Navajo-Hopi filmmaker/director Angelo Baca. A post-showing reception featured a photo exhibit of the Bears Ears region by Fiona McLeod ’19. Shash Jaa’ details the efforts of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition against the reduction of Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument by 85 percent after President Trump’s 2017 executive order. It is a continuation of the film Into America: The Ancestors’ Land, directed by Baca & Nadine Zacharias, which examined natural resource extraction in southeastern Utah.
coe faculty-student grant program supports o’connell’s antarctic research
This past January, Nethra Pullela ’20, Liz Atalig ’21, and Jackie Duckett ’20 joined E&ES Professor Suzanne O’Connell on a journey to the center of the earth–traveling to the International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) at Texas A&M University to collect data and samples for O’Connell’s “Where Was the Antarctic Oligocene Ice?” project, funded by the COE’s Faculty-Student Research Grant Program.