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“The Battle for the Story:” Spanish Carceral Policy and Frozen Conflict in the Basque Country
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Reimagining Smith’s Landscape for Climate Justice
No full textWhile Smith College has taken action to address climate change and improve sustainability, little attention has been given to implementing climate justice within the physical campus landscape. This project sought to design ways by which this topic could be made more concrete. We engaged in rigorous research via a literature review and interviews with faculty and staff stakeholders. Our research findings helped frame our understanding of the context and enabled us to craft a concept for our project experimentation: creating a safe space for students of color to express their views on Smith’s current landscape and suggest future changes. Then we facilitated a visioning exercise with BIPOC students where we used collaborative mapmaking to reimagine the landscape. Using students’ suggestions from that exercise, we recommend six potential projects that are geared towards improving the campus and promoting safe spaces for BIPOC students in the physical landscape of Smith College
Outlining the Hidden Curriculum: Perspectives on Successfully Navigating Scientific Conferences
Get PDFScientific conferences and meetings are valuable opportunities for researchers to network, communicate, and develop knowledge. For early career scientists, conferences can also be intimidating, confusing, and overwhelming, especially without having adequate preparation or experience. In this Perspective, we provide advice based on previous experiences navigating scientific meetings and conferences. These guidelines outline parts of the hidden curriculum around preparing for and attending meetings, navigating conference sessions, networking with other scientists, and participating in social activities while upholding a recommended code of conduct
Evaluating the Scope of Harm Reduction Services in Western Massachusetts & How to Become Involved
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Fragments of a Self: embodiments, (re)enactments, and re-encounters with memory
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Our stories tell us who we are. The sense of self acquires temporary coherence through the stories we tell ourselves and others. This chapter considers the self-shaping work of story, looking at acting and writing processes as they contribute to the construction of self. Self-narrative, in its many iterations - memoir, autobiography, life writing - allows us to script an identity which shifts, transforms, dissolves, and reconstitutes itself over time and across circumstances. Actors and writers cannibalize memory to nourish their creative work. Traumatic memory, though unreliable and often inaccessible, may return unbidden to offer a pathway to exploration, revelation, and exposure of the ever-shifting self. The self is singular, but not single. It is unique and persistent, but not stable. We remember, re-member, and mis-remember the past to construct a provisional, always changing indisputably unique, self. We crave unity, but our memories are fractured, selective. When does memory become a story?
Book abstract:
This insightful book explores the impact of traumatic experiences on the constitution of narrative identity. Editors Edmundo Balsemão Pires, Cláudio Alexandre S. Carvalho, and Joana Ricarte bring together multidisciplinary experts to examine the epistemic and ethical-political value of narrative memory, demonstrating its significance in forming essential aspects of the self and collective identity.https://scholarworks.smith.edu/the_books/1006/thumbnail.jp
Belonging in the Classroom is Not the Same as Belonging in a Course: Inclusivity Through Assessments
Get PDFClassroom belonging does not solely refer to how students feel but extends to how students and their communities are integrated into the course structure. This personal narrative focuses on how I restructured my assessments to incorporate students’ communities and identities into course assessments. Because we test on what is most important, integrating student identities and backgrounds into assessments enabled me to emphasize that students belonged in the course and the classroom
Evaluating the Case For Green Schoolyards: Equity and Climate Adaption in Massachusetts Public Elementary Schools
No full textExposure to vegetation, both in and outside the context of schoolyards, is linked with a myriad of psychological, social, physiological, and developmental benefits, while the greenery itself yields important environmental outcomes. However, access to green schoolyards—defined here as schoolyards with abundant vegetation and other natural elements—varies significantly, with many schools in low-income areas being surrounded by large amounts of impermeable surfaces, like concrete and asphalt, with few natural features. Our project seeks to make the case for implementing greenery into lacking schoolyards to close this gap and promote equitable access. In a literature review, we outline key benefits linked with green schoolyards and racial and socioeconomic inequalities in access. We explain barriers to implementation, particularly cost, and offer an overview of past and ongoing efforts to implement green schoolyards both nationally and within Massachusetts. We also present the results and interpretation of our own mapping analysis cross-comparing the vegetative cover, academic performance, and school closures due to extreme heat events of public elementary schools in two Massachusetts districts of different socioeconomic status: Holyoke and Winchester. We found a broad range of benefits associated with green schoolyards in our literature review, though the results of our mapping analysis were mixed. Based on the information we found, we offer recommendations for paths forward to increase equitable access to green schoolyards. Our goal with this project is to incorporate greening schoolyards into Massachusetts legislation by 2026. We recommend Massachusetts Bill S.2885 as a potential foundation for this effort, and also advise coupling this legal route with volunteer initiatives. We hope that our work will serve as part of a larger movement to increase equitable access to nature and its associated benefits while also helping to promote climate resilience in schools
Navigating Environmental Sustainability in the Corporate Sector
No full textCorporate environmental sustainability is experiencing a major surge in activity. The notion that capitalist enterprises can transform themselves to become more sustainable aligns with ecological modernization theory, which holds that our current economic system can become environmentally sustainable, especially through technological innovation. Organization scholars studying corporate environmental sustainability (CES) typically align with ecological modernization principles and focus their research on company-level norms and practices in order to suggest managerial improvements. Critical political economists, on the other hand, argue that capital accumulation and growth are fundamental drivers of environmental exploitation and that CES efforts are unlikely to yield significant results. We examine CES practices and experiences through a study of 51 in-depth interviews with sustainability professionals from the business sector. We focus on two questions: (1) whether respondents see tensions between profitability and environmentalism in their work and (2) how they envision squaring the growth imperative with planetary limits. We find that most CES work continues to fall within a business-case framework and that sustainability professionals do not regularly engage with the question of economic growth in their work. Responses indicate conflict between the profit imperative and environmental sustainability that suggest serious barriers to effective corporate sustainability. We interpret these constraints to be structurally produced and suggest that legal structures limit the extent to which the corporate sphere can be expected to achieve transformative environmental sustainability. We propose that future research examines corporate legal structures with an eye towards identifying potential levers for change