Energy and Environmental Policy graduate student Alexis Pascaris (SS) coauthored an article with Chelsea Schelly (SS) and Joshua Pearce (MSE/ECE) titled “Integrating solar energy with agriculture: Industry perspectives on the market, community, and socio-political dimensions of agrivoltaics,” in Energy Research & Social Science.
In collaboration with a class taught by Angie Carter (SS), the Western Upper Peninsula Food Systems Collaborative (WUPFSC) kicked off the Western UP Food Stories Photo Contest last fall.
The students in the course — Communities and Research SS4700 — reached out to local growers, enthusiasts, and anyone who eats to share what local foods in the Keweenaw means to them. Since a picture is worth 1,000 words, they encouraged community members to share their experiences in a visual format.
The course, which is based on transdisciplinary research methods, supports students in creating studies driven by needs identified from community members to ensure that their research would directly serve and empower the community.
The class gathered all the photos on Flickr and some of the winning images are gathered on the University research blog, Unscripted. Check them out at mtu.edu/unscripted . (By Allison Mills, University Marketing and Communications)
Don Lafreniere (SS/GLRC) and an interdisciplinary group of students recently published an article titled “Schools as Vectors of Infectious Disease Transmission during the 1918 Influenza Pandemic” in the journal Cartographica: The International Journal of Geographic Information and Geovisualization.
The article outlines how to use census and health microdata to follow infectious disease transmission between public school children during a pandemic. The paper leans on data created by public contributors to the Keweenaw Time Traveler project. The towns of Calumet and Laurium served as the case study.
Nancy Langston (SS/CFRES) has been awarded the 2021 Distinguished Scholar Award from the American Society for Environmental History. This award is given to one individual each year who has contributed significantly to environmental history scholarship and recognizes exceptional lifetime achievement in the field.
Langston has published five books and more than 50 peer-reviewed papers, and she has been awarded more than a million dollars in competitive external funding. Her current research, on woodland caribou and other migratory wildlife of the north, is supported with a Fulbright Research Chair, a Mellon Fellowship, a Mandel Award in the Humanities, and an NSF research grant in Science and Technology Studies.
New publication on the history of oil palm plantations
A new article exploring the history of the first oil palm plantations by Jonathan Robins (SS) has been published in the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies.
The article examines the economic, political, and environmental factors that contributed to the early growth of the oil palm industry, which is today the world’s largest supplier of vegetable oil
Angie Carter has published an invited essay “Thinking Downstream” in Compelling Ground: Landscapes, Environments, and Peoples of Iowa, a book documenting the exhibit of the same name that has recently opened at the Brunnier Art Museum in Ames, Iowa.
She will take part in a panel “The Changing Face of Iowa Farming” on Tuesday, April 13 as part of the exhibit’s virtual events.
Shan Zhou (SS) published a sole-authored article “The Effect of Smart Meter Penetration on Dynamic Electricity Pricing: Evidence from the United States” in The Electricity Journal.
The paper explores how electric utilities in the U.S. are leveraging AMI meter installations to implement dynamic pricing programs.
Angie Carter (Social Sciences) and co-author Andrea Basche (agronomy, University of Nebraska) published “Training future agriculture professionals in landowner–tenant conservation decision‐making” in Natural Sciences Education.
The paper analyzes collaborative conservation case studies; the research was funded by the North Central Region – Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education.
Adam Wellstead (SS) and Gemma Carey (University of New South Wales) published “Introduction: The Virtual World of the Public Servant,” In: Sullivan H., Dickinson H., Henderson H. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of the Public Servant. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.
Kari B. Henquinet (SS/PHC) published article “Time, (Com)passion, and Ethical Self-Formation in Evangelical Humanitarianism” in a special issue of the Journal of Religious Ethics focused on the anthropology of ethics, moral experimentation, and humanitarianism. The article is available here.