Emma S. Norman (SS) has been accepted as a writing fellow to the Helen R. Whiteley Center at Friday Harbor Labs (Washington State) for July-August 2013. She will be working on her book project, “Whose Border, Whose Water? Postcolonial Governance of (Trans)boundary Waters–First Peoples, Canada, and the United States” (Routledge Press, Earthscan Series). http://depts.washington.edu/fhl/Whiteley/
From Tech Today.
Students in Richelle Winkler’s Topics in Rural Community Sustainability course (SS 4390) spent the spring semester collaborating with community organizations in Calumet to analyze how First Fridays art tours affect community sustainability. The project inventoried community assets and assessed how First Fridays contribute to these assets using participation observation, interviews, and surveys of First Fridays participants. The research team surveyed 368 visitors to eight art spaces on First Fridays in February, March, and April of 2013. Study results indicate that First Fridays and the art scene are making broad contributions to community well-being. The program has potential to spur a process of holistic community development; yet there are several opportunities of which First Fridays are not yet fully taking advantage. For instance, social relationships are one of the most important things that First Fridays participants value, and the development of social capital is perhaps the most key contribution of First Fridays. However, we find that social capital associated with First Fridays remains somewhat narrow as similar people visit the same one or two art spaces each month and interact with one another. These relationships are important, but First Fridays may be missing opportunities to establish new relationships among multiple groups and to integrate younger people and families. Based on the findings, the team suggests that First Fridays and the art community in Calumet could build on current successes by engaging in a visioning process whereby community members work together to define a vision and goals for the First Fridays program. The process could help to coordinate advertising efforts, build and solidify social relationships, coordinate with external agencies (such as Main Street Calumet, Michigan Tech, or Finlandia), develop leadership, establish a political voice in the community and beyond, and attract more and more diverse visitors. The community may find that Calumet community members, artists and art space proprietors would benefit from forming a formal Calumet Arts organization that would serve to organize these efforts and coordinate with external groups.
Read the Executive Summary or the First Fridays Calumet Community Report
Team members included:
The vice president for research is pleased to announce this year’s recipients of the Research Excellence Fund Awards, and would like to thank all of the review committee members for participating in this important internal award process.
Emma Norman and Steven Walton received Scholarship and Creativity Grants.
Adam Wellstead received a Research Seed Grant.
Read more at Tech Today.
Michigan Tech students found a low-cost, highly effective way to reduce the impact of cooking over biomass fires without designing and installing high-tech, costly stoves. They have been invited by the Environmental Protection Agency to take their work to Washington, DC, to participate in the EPA’s annual Sustainable Design Expo. Known as P3 (People, Prosperity and the Planet), the competition challenges college and university teams to design and develop sustainable technologies to help protect the world’s health and the environment.
The cookstove project team includes Mark DeYoung and Jonathan May, mechanical engineering; Travis Wakeham, anthropology and biological sciences; and Jarod Maggio, Abram Peterson, Mollie Ruth, Kelli Whelan and Alex Wohlgemuth, environmental engineering. Their faculty advisor is Kurt Paterson, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering.
Read more at Michigan Tech News, by Jennifer Donovan.
CBS Detroit and its Technology Report published an article about Michigan Tech’s two student teams chosen to exhibit in the EPA Sustainable Design Expo in Washington, DC, this week. See EPA Sustainable Design Expo.
From Tech Today.
Emma S. Norman (SS) presented her paper, “The Citizen, the State, and Environmental Governance: How indigenous actors, citizen scientists and regional constructions are reshaping transborder water governance” and served on a panel related to indigenous water rights at the Association of American Geographers Conference in Los Angeles (April 9 – 12).
From Tech Today.
Richelle Winkler, MTU asst. prof. of sociology and demography, and her colleague Ken Johnson at the University of New Hampshire and other colleagues at Univ. of Wisconsin – Madison recently released a new interactive website that graphically displays net migration patterns for counties in the US from the 1950s-2010. Her work and the website were recently profiled in USA Today (12 Apr.) in an article “Age, kids and jobs affect where Americans live“. The website is available to everyone to explore at www.netmigration.wisc.edu.
Assistant Professor of History Louise Dyble (SS), has been awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment of Humanities (NEH). From the NEH website:
“The NEH Summer Stipends program provides awards for individuals to pursue scholarly work in the humanities during the summer. Projects may contribute to scholarly knowledge in a particular discipline or to the general public’s understanding of the humanities, and they may address broad topics or focused research in a single field. Recipients typically produce scholarly articles, books, archeological site reports, translations, editions, or other scholarly tools in either traditional print or electronic formats.”
From Tech Today.
Emma S. Norman (SS) published the following article, “ Who’s counting? Spatial politics, ecocolonisation and the politics of calculation in Boundary Bay,” Royal Geographical Society.
From Tech Today.
Professor Alex Mayer (CEE/CWS), Professor Kathleen Halvorsen (SS/CWS), Professor Noel Urban (CEE/CWS), Assistant Professor Emma Norman (SS/CWS) and Assistant Professor Richelle Winkler (SS/CWS), “Coastal SEES (Track 2) Collaborative: The Third Coast: Keys to the Sustainability of the Great Lakes Coastal Socio-Ecological System,” NSF.
From Tech Today.
The Graduate School is pleased to announce that Evan Anderson is Michigan Tech’s nominee for the Midwestern Association of Graduate Schools Distinguished Thesis Award.
Three other graduate students were also nominated for consideration. Jean DeClerck was nominated by her advisors, Ann Brady and Wendy Anderson (HU) and committee member Victoria Bergvall (HU). Nathan Kelley-Hoskins was nominated by his advisor, Petra Hüntemeyer (Physics). Andrew Orthober was nominated by his advisor, Carol MacLennan (SS). All of the nominations were noteworthy for their scholarship, and the evaluation panel had a difficult task in selecting one nominee to represent Michigan Tech.
Read more at Tech Today, by the Graduate School.