Ethics & the Common Good Project Awards Student Grants

This year, ECG awarded grants up to $500 to 12 students for projects and research engaging in a wide range of research interests, including:

• a sustainable development project with a campesina coffee cooperative,
• a relational somatics curriculum,
• a social justice online platform for black femme survival and resilience,
• a congressional internship with the Office of U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren in Washington D.C.,
• development of an ethical sustainable design plan for land-based communities, and
• an investigation into sustainable aquaculture.

The awardees and their projects are detailed below. ECG’s next student grant opportunity will be open to proposals in Spring 2018 for the Summer 2018 Social Justice Internship Awards, followed by the next round of Student Project Grants to reopen in Fall 2018. If you would like more information about these grant opportunities, and ECG in general, contact commongood@hampshire.edu or call 413.559.6247.

Fall 2017 Student Project Grant Awards

Alice Grendon | Division III Project

A Quaker Vision for Collaboration and Creation: Life-Affirming Communities and Art in a Post-Systems Collapse World

Alice Grendon will be facilitating a year-long collaborative dance/performance-making process exploring themes of the making of community, values that hold community together, hopes for communities that nurture and build, and the importance of community for social change and resiliency. Alice and collaborators will share their community’s dances in a performance-event in April 2018 and invite the audience into their process as both a work of art and a conversation.

Grant Holub-Moorman | Division III Research

Más allá que la participación: Colectividad campesina y cooperativismo cafetalero (Beyond participation: Campesina Collectivity and Coffee Cooperativism)

Grant Holub-Moorman will be traveling to Jaltenango, Chiapas, Mexico to work with los Campesinos Ecológicos de la Sierra Madre de Chiapas (Cesmach) in engaging with the community’s request for support in training and collaborating with campesinas as partners in building a network of local researchers and planning a community event for Cesmach’s women’s advocacy group. Grant will be working with women from Cesmach in designing and leading their own research project on sustainable development, determining a strategy towards collective advancement in campesina-led workshops, agroecological farming, shared land management, livestock breeding networks, and campesina-owned household production and distribution.

Jade Silverstein | Division III Research

Perceptions of Marine Aquaculture Development in the Northeast U.S.

Jade Silverstein will be exploring the cultivation of the oceans as a commons by assessing stakeholder perceptions, knowledge, and support of aquaculture policy and processes in order to bring awareness to its future ethical and ecological possibilities. Jade hopes her research will  broaden perceptions of the industry by interviewing and engaging with both retailers and consumers as potent agents in the global commodity chain. She will present her research through an informative booklet in order to share and discuss what she has gathered with those she interviewed and her local communities.

Justin Taft-Morales | Division III Project

Authentic Connections for Transformative Change

Justin Taft-Morales will be presenting a podcast and research paper that explores what it means to facilitate authentic spaces for connection while living in a culture of separation. Through interviewing organizers, facilitators, teachers, friends, and community members, Justin will question himself and his community about experiences of extraction, suspicion, and retribution in order to move towards imagining a future built on sharing, appreciation, and transformation. He hopes the podcast will provide listeners with concrete tools to assess their daily interactions and engage with the world in a more connected, relational way.

Leila Kaplan | Division III Project

The Body as a Relational Tool

Leila Kaplan will be creating a two-week summer program curriculum for teenagers that explores embodied relationships to self, to each other, to land, and to its histories. Using contemplative somatic practices, storytelling and resonance tools, and place-based education, the curriculum will share how building these kinds of relationships can better facilitate the reinhabitation and care of the land and the body. 

Malaika Ross | Division III Research

Agroecology in the Caribbean: The role of Caribbean women in the conservation of crop genetic diversity. Case Study: St. Croix and St. Thomas, United States Virgin Islands (U.S.V.I.)

Malaika Ross will be traveling to St. Croix and St. Thomas of the United States Virgin Islands (U.S.V.I.) to quantify and document the roles small-scale women farmers of African descent play in the cultural, agricultural, and ecological resiliency of the Caribbean region. Through field research and interviews, Malaika will explore how these small-scale women farmers of African descent are sustaining and restoring their ecosystems in the face of colonialism’s historical extractive economy and engage in their connection to cultural identity and empowerment.

Nisaa Jackson | Division III Project

Reimagining Blackness in Art and Media

Nisaa Jackson will be researching works by black women playwrights, with the goal of depicting blackness in diverse and holistic ways through art and media. She will select one play to direct and act in alongside a cast of Hampshire students this spring. Nisaa will partner with a local community organization to bring black youth and youth of color from the region to one of her shows, to offer an educational experience of representation in art that is positive and affirming. With audiences of all ages, Nisaa will use interactive Theatre of the Oppressed methodologies to invite audience members to ask themselves ethical questions about their role in ending the perpetuation of stereotypes about people who occupy marginalized identities.

Noa Coffey-Moore | Division III Project

Black Femme Survival

Noa Coffey-Moore will be creating an online platform called Black Femme Survival, in which they will build a transformative space to support black & brown queer femmes in learning, healing, and thriving together. Noa will create a website that features a podcast, artist blog, workshop curriculums, and resources like the Black Femme Survival Guide, a workbook in service of developing a movement and community of practice for black & brown femme care. They hope this multi-media approach will increase access to crucial resources for young femmes of color in need of supportive and resilient community.

Olivia Brochu | Division II Field Study

Washington, D.C. Political Internship

Olivia Brochu will be spending her field study interning at Elizabeth Warren’s office in Washington, D.C. to engage with politics and public policy. This will contribute to her ongoing studies of political science and women’s and immigration studies at Hampshire. Olivia hopes to learn more about the inner workings of the American government and specific strategies that work to bring about social change through policy and campaigning. She also hopes to gain experience working with both politicians and constituents from many different communities and backgrounds, and learn how to confront and constructively engage with those who have different political opinions.

Taran Wilkens-Plumley | Division III Research

Welcomed Into Being: A Case Study of Collectivism

Taran Wilkens-Plumley will be exploring the ethics of sustainable design for land-based community purposes by building a comprehensive design plan for a collective community space in Millerton, NY. Taran’s architectural design will focus on how people forge relationships with the land around them and with each other by creating a design that is informed by the land’s history, blends with the local site, and will facilitate community interaction and personal connection.

Tess O’Day | Division III Project

Somatic Geography: Embodied Displacements in Urban Environments

Tess O’Day will research the trauma of displacement and loss of place, and how these manifest in the collective emotional landscape. Instead of looking at how people move through places, Tess will look at how places move through and resonate in people, connecting physical geographies with histories and bodies. Using her own personal family histories in Chicago to explore these themes, Tess will interview, research, and choreograph a process that examines urbanization, privatization, and gentrification to invite herself, her collaborators, and her audience into their own embodied experiences about place and loss.

Yasmina Mattison-Sudan | Division II Project

Photographic Witness

Yasmina Mattison-Sudan will be exploring what it means to see and be seen in vulnerability by using photography as a powerful method of witnessing. Yasmina’s images will document the young women of color in the Community Dance Program of the Embodied Leadership Project, and their embodied research into the neurobiology of connection and collective strength. She hopes these images will add rare visual representations of young women of color facilitating healing, embodying vulnerability, and working in leadership positions to the world of fine art photography.