Grant funding up to $500 to support individual or collaborative student projects that address a common good issue / community need.

Common Good Student Project Grant Guidelines

Victoria Lee's notebook
Application Deadlines: 
Fall Semester: October 15th
Spring Semester: February 18th

Apply by filling out the Hampshire College Student Grant Application Form

Application Guidelines:

Common Good Student Project Grants have a funding limit of $500 per student per year to support individual or collaborative student projects. Funded projects will address a common good issue / community need, and contribute to advancing the mission and goals of the Ethics & the Common Good Project.

  • The student must be in good academic standing.
  • Funding period is for projects occurring any time before the end of Spring 2021 semester.
  • Funds must be used to support student projects that advance the common good on or off campus, including Division II and Division III projects.
  • Collaborative projects encouraged, each applicant should submit their own application.
  • Awards will not be given for projects that have already been completed.
  • Applications will be reviewed the ECG grant committee.

Proposal should include: 

Description of your proposed project or research, including references to any relevant texts or other supporting materials. State the specific aims or guiding questions of your project. Describe the timeline, components, and implementation of your project. Include relevant background information on the previous preparation and experiences that led you to this project/research. Incorporate reflections on the following questions:

  • How is your project serving a community need?
  • What are the values and principles that guide your work?
  • What are some of the (ethical) questions and dilemmas arising in the work?
  • What are the goals of your project, and how do these contribute to advancing the goals of the Ethics & the Common Good Project?
  • What are the outcomes that you hope to achieve?

Budget
Necessary project-related costs are eligible for funding.
These include materials, supplies, small equipment or software, payments to research subjects, travel expenses for field work (with field study leave or full enrollment), and other expenses eligible for grant assistance. List each item, its cost, and a description of its purpose if not immediately clear. Also, list the names and amounts of other received or pending grants. If you need materials ordered by mail, add $10 to $40 into your budget to cover shipping and handling costs, depending on quantity and source.

A letter of support from one of your Division III committee members (Division III students) or Division II committee members (Division II students), your research supervisor, or another faculty member familiar with your work. Division III students must attach a copy of the filed Division III contract (screen shot from TheHub).Division II students must attach a copy of the filed Division II contract (screen shot from TheHub).

Award Criteria:

  • Quality of proposed work, including merit and feasibility.
  • Demonstrated need for special equipment, travel, or supplies.
  • Alignment with the mission and goals of the Ethics and the Common Good Project

Rules for Award Recipients:

Students who receive an award are expected to send a brief (1-2 page) report at the end of the project, summarizing their experience and describing how the funds were spent. Multimedia reports encouraged for grantees working in creative modalities.

Past Student Project Grants

Fall 2020 – Spring 2021

Ashley Burns-Merrill | Division III Grant
The Hunger Hut: A Mini Food/Resource Pantry

Connor Honey B. Dandy | Division III Grant
Curating Emotional Experience through Multimedia Design and Communication

Chloe Knoble | Division III Grant
Disability and Work

Dwight Young | Division III Grant
Entry Barriers for Black Startup Fashion Enterprises

Daisha Dukes and Yaritza Bushell | Collaborative Division III Grant
The We Belong Project

Fiona Rodriguez Drake | Division III Grant
Community Compassion Project

Maria Molina | Division III Grant
‘Exchanging U For Eye”

Mecca Lewis | Division III Grant
‘Perspectives from “Nowhere”’

Serene Nembhard | Division III Grant
Black Hair/Memory Diaspora

Darleane Torres and Alison Smith | Collaborative Community Grant
Transitioning to Adulthood Workshop Series

Eli Alejo and Sierra Karas | Collaborative Community Grant
Re-Envisioning Another World at Hampshire Handbook

The 2021 Collaborative Community Project Grants were awarded in partnership with the Community Commons Peer Mentorship Program.

Fall 2019 – Spring 2020

Urooba Ahmed | Division III Project
Menstrual Equity – The Road to an Equal World
Urooba Ahmed has taken her academic focus to real-world action on menstrual equity, through raising awareness and creating access to menstruation products and infrastructure in schools in Karachi, Pakistan and the United States. Urooba’s project is a continuation of a previous case study, in which she identified infrastructure gaps that represented barriers to school participation, especially for young women and girls, such as lack of access to restrooms at school. Returning to the school in Pakistan where she conducted initial research, Urooba’s project implementation plan involves construction of bathroom facilities and other tangible support for educational participation through menstrual equity.

Abigail Bevan | Division III Project
My Mother, The Red Light
Abigail Bevan has written and designed an experimental one-act play, My Mother, The Red Light, which uses creative animated projections to propel the story of a sex worker and her teenage daughter as they navigate life together. With this design-driven theatre piece, Abigail aims to collaboratively create a constructive dialogue about sex work beyond stereotypes and criminalization, explore journeys of trauma and healing, and continue to push for equity for those living below the poverty line across axes of experience.

Annielly Camargo | Division III Project
Lo que hay / What there is
Annielly Camargo is returning to Cuba to build her Division III as a continuation of her work in the 2019 Hampshire in Havana Program. Annielly will create photographic research and interviews, aiming to share histories of U.S./Cuba relations through the stories of Cuban families affected by migration and exile. Using mixed-media writing and imagery, Annielly will weave stories of leaving and staying, imperialism and resistance, and the water that surrounds and connects. By building relationships and sharing art and narrative across the intergenerational experiences of Cuban community members, Annielly hopes to shift perspectives and assumptions about Cuba for U.S. audiences.

Rejjia Camphor | Division III Project
Crafting Sisters & Mapping Labyrinths
Rejjia Camphor is designing creative arts collaborations that center mental health and emotional liberation through celebrating contributions from black girls and women. Rejjia hopes to introduce black feminist pedagogical models to support conversation on intersectional oppression, enviromental communication, and for people to evaluate their own positions in achieving black liberation. Rejjia’s Division III draws on map-making and path finding as a creative means of traversing the past, present, and future of our own liberation and healing.

Lexx Cespedes | Division III Project
Why is Mom Striking? The Strike Wave as told by Union Families
Lexx Cespedes is utilizing a creative interview-based methodology with parents, caretakers, young children, and expectant families from Massachusetts-based union locals and working class organizations to write and illustrate a children’s literature series. Expanding on the success of their previous grant-funded first edition of Why is Mom Striking, Lexx hopes that their second book will facilitate further conversations between parents and children on class struggle, workers’ histories, and relevant issues in organized labor.

Arianna Diaz-Celon | Division III Project
Making Art, Making Space
Arianna Diaz-Celon is exploring interdisciplinary curation by facilitating spaces where different types of performance and visual arts can be experienced together. She is interested in making the process of art-making more accessible, including the financial or physical accessibility of a space, but also how to create openness and social access across differences of lived experience. Overall, Arianna’s goal in organizing the “Making Art, Making Space” arts festival is to imagine new ways of facilitating collaboration on campus and to use the arts and art-making to bring people together and foster community.

Judah Doty | Division II Field Study
Cuba: A Model for Higher Education
Judah Doty is researching the Cuban education system as a comparative model for increasing access and innovation within U.S. higher education. As a Common Good and James Baldwin Scholars Program 2019 Intern, Judah worked in Cuba as research assistant and youth counselor for Acts of Liberation– a grassroots organization which engages with black and brown youth in the U.S. and abroad to explore what liberation means to them. Wanting to expand on this opportunity and further focus on comparative U.S./Cuba educational studies, Judah will pursue an immersive Spanish program in Cuba, with the goal of participating in the Spring 2021 Hampshire in Havana Program.

Sejeia Freelon | Division III Project
Blubone
In blubone, Sejeia Freelon is connecting decolonial and feminist scientific approaches, oral historical methodologies, black southern traditions of contemplation and action, and collective meaning making through art, media, and performance. Among a multiplicity of methods, Sejeia invited seven Black Femmes of southern origin to contribute oral histories providing insight to their experiences of birth and becoming, accompanying performance-based research. Sejeia, alongside collaborating artists, inquire together about the pursuit of pleasure within localities of grief and ontologies of violence.

Bela Haye | Division III Project
High Tide: A Community-Based Installation
Addressing the importance of building vibrant and interdependent communities at Hampshire College, Bela Haye is designing “High Tide: A Community-Based Installation” for the Music and Dance Building. This interactive place-making experience would temporarily transform the building into a series of performances, interactive sound installations, creative and technical audio and recording workshops, and social gathering spaces. Bela has committed herself to working towards a wider goal of reconnecting humans to sounds, senses, and the natural world.

Jenny Gutierrez | Division III Project
An Exploration of Vulnerability: A Design Driven Performance
Jenny Gutierrez is creating an installation-based performance as the culmination of her studies of technical theater and social justice. Jenny’s performance, video, and design work will delve into stories of vulnerability, particularly within cultural and familial experiences. Beyond the space of the performance, Jenny hopes to create and facilitate creative conditions where reconnecting with vulnerability can help us grow stronger as a community.

Aubriana Mency | Division III Project
Blood At The Root
Aubriana Mency will be co-directing a choreopoem titled Blood At The Root, written by Domonique Morisseau. Blood At The Root is a historical fiction piece inspired by the cases of the Jena Six, created from interviews with residents of Jena, Louisiana in 2006. A focal point of the project centers on an educational outreach strategy with students from Amherst Regional Middle School. Through bringing students to campus for special performances designed for youth, Aubriana and her collaborators will invite their audience to reflect on their world through creative engagement with history and the arts, and explore ways we can create a community that recognizes and embraces differences.

Patricia Quispe | Division II Project
“Knowledge” / Quechua Alliance Annual Meeting
Patricia Quispe is working on a short documentary film, drawing inspiration from participation in the Quechua Alliance Annual Meeting, an event that brings together Quechua speakers, community leaders, college students and professors who share an interest and passion for Quechua language and Andean culture. Pati’s film, “Knowledge”, brings into question the relationship between livelihood and knowledge, acknowledging and seeking to repair the damage of isolation, inequity and death that the dominant modes of this dynamic often perpetrate. Pati’s film is situated in the larger community project of networking among diasporic Quechua peoples in order to sustain their common knowledge and values.

Jing Shang | Division III Project
Anthropological Significance and Commercial Sense of Plant-Based Meat Industry:
A Comparative Study of Whole Perfect Food and Impossible Foods
Jing Shang will be focusing on the values and ideological features of plant-based meat in China and the United States. By comparing plant-based meat enterprises located in the U.S. and in China, Jing aims to understand cross-cultural economics and practices of vegetarianism. Jing hopes the research will help shed light on the social dynamics of plant-based meat, a growing industry that will possibly shape dietary habits, food systems, and vegetarianism in the future.

Emma Symanski | Division III Project
English Through a Photographic Lens: Teaching English as a Second Language Using Photography
Emma Symanski is designing and facilitating a free photography-based course for English Language Learners, hosted at the International Language Institute in Northampton, MA. Emma appreciates the way that photography can be a tool for accessible learning and community building. Through a curriculum designed to support self-expression and connection across language, participants are encouraged to share their photography skills and interests. Emma also invited class members to collaborate with her on a portrait series, lifting up English Language Learners’ stories and journeys within their wider communities.

Lachlan Thompson | Division III Project
Finding Confluences: Re/Living Trauma and Cultivating Care
Lachlan Thompson is designing an art-infused storytelling and dialogue group for queer and trans survivors of interpersonal and intimate partner violence in collaboration with the Survivor Arts Project. In addition, they are designing a practice-based workshop series exploring the idea of nurturance culture, and also creating an art installation around these themes. Lachlan believes that peer-to-peer support models encourage relationship and community building, as well as empowering survivors to see themselves as experts in their own care and experience.

Fall 2018

Alea Alexis ​| Division III Project
Attendant: Portraits for My Mother, Her Workplace, and Her House
Alea Alexis will be exploring the connections between work, care, diaspora, embodiment, and home as she photographs her mother and other nurses at NYU Langone Medical Center. Alea’s images will document and uplift their stories, while investigating the impacts of working within the healthcare industry on their health and homes, including her own foreclosed former family home. She hopes these images will illuminate the underrecognized role of Black immigrants in the nursing industry, and expand representation of their stories through art.

Aly Albertson ​| Division III Research
The Promises and Perils of Pleasure Positive Sexual Education
Aly Albertson will conduct interviews with educators bringing best practices in inclusive, pleasure-positive sex education into public school classroom settings, collating their experiences into a review of methods intended to serve as a resource for sex educators. Aly will also connect professionally with colleagues in their field at the National Sexual Education Conference, the largest conference in the United States exclusively devoted to sexuality education, as well as participating in Planned Parenthood’s Sexuality Education Cornerstone Seminar.

Amelia Margolis and Emma Jordan ​| Collaborative Division II Project
Hampshire Free Store
Amelia Margolis and Emma Jordan, along with a coalition of students from on-campus student groups, will offer pop-up spaces for resource redistribution, celebration, and connection throughout the Spring 2019 semester. Hampshire Free Store events provide a fun and accessible space for students to regularly donate, exchange, and reuse unwanted items while sharing free food, music, and connecting with fellow community members. The Hampshire Free Store team hopes to raise awareness and take action around challenges of campus waste, food insecurity, and the need for community in times of change.

Annie Wood ​| Division III Project
HIPS Oral History Project
Annie Wood will conduct an oral history of HIPS, a harm reduction center in Washington, DC that predominantly serves sex workers and injection drug users, providing services from a syringe exchange to housing support. Using interviews with current and former staff members, Annie will chart a trajectory of how HIPS has developed over the past twenty years, analyzing how they’ve practiced harm reduction, rooted themselves in local communities, and developed their philosophy of care.

Brianna Deane ​| Division III Project
Youth Day at Five College Queer Gender & Sexuality Conference
Brianna Deane will coordinate and organize the addition of a ‘Youth Day’ to the 10th Annual Five College Queer Gender & Sexuality Conference. Dedicated to empowering pre-college LGBTQ+ youth, Youth Day will be one of the only conferences of its kind in the Northeast region. Through a broad spectrum of free workshops, panels, performances, and lectures, Youth Day aims to offer an accessible platform for LGBTQ+ young people to explore youth-led initiatives and activism, grassroots organizing, professional skill development, personal and community wellness, and artistic expression.

Carmen Figueroa ​| Division III Project
Fragments of Belonging
Carmen Figueroa curated her thesis collection of large-scale photographic works and video installation of her family in New York and Puerto Rico in the Hampshire Art Gallery in December 2018. Part artistic exaltation and part institutional critique, her project ​Fragments of Belonging recreates and reimagines her family, herself, and their stories to shape wholeness from fragments of images and memories. Through her work, Carmen reflects on using photography to regain authorship and agency of her own narrative, recapture knowledge both stolen and lost, and reclaim historically limiting spaces to create a world of belonging that centers diasporic wisdom.

Che Williams ​| Division II Project
Exploitation in Amateur Basketball
Che Williams will travel around the United States to film and produce a full-length documentary on the exploitation of student athletes in the world of amateur basketball. The documentary hopes to shine a new light on the collusion between basketball associations, like the NCAA, AAU, and NBA, aided by the sneaker industry and Hip Hop icons, all raking in huge profits off the labor of Black and brown youth trying to make it big in the competitive world of amateur sports. Che will center the voices of the athletes as they speak on the challenges and supports they face moving towards their dreams, and their visions for the future of the amateur basketball system.

Dunan Herman-Parks ​| Division III Project
Movement to be Better Men
Dunan Herman-Parks will craft and facilitate an 8-week workshop series on disentangling cultural patterns of harm through embodied investigations making meaning of masculinities. Dunan will guide an intergenerational cohort of men, who will support one another in understanding themselves, their stories, and messages about masculinity that they’ve internalized. In moving through and reflecting upon their experiences, Dunan hopes to lead the group in healing from harm they’ve seen in themselves and others, reconnecting mind and body, and creating ethical visions of healthy masculinity.

Emi Link ​| Division III Project
Peer Mentorship at Hampshire College
Emi Link will lead a cohort of students in a day-long training, developing skills to create a network of Peer Mentors within the academic structure of Hampshire College. In this pilot program, peer mentors would support fellow students within the context of academic advising, creating a systematic approach to increasing access to key knowledge, support, and resources learned through the process of participation in the uniquely self-directed and interdisciplinary Hampshire educational model.

Emmett DuPont ​| Division III Project
Trans People, Trans Bodies: in and out of birth, parenthood, and pregnancy
Emmett DuPont will create an episodic audio podcast exploring narratives of transgender people in birth and pregnancy. Through interviews with transgender parents, doctors, and loved ones, the podcast will weave personal narrative, technology, and education together, highlighting seldom-heard stories of transgender birth and parenting, as well as the voices of trans people who choose not to pursue biological parenthood. Emmett hopes to challenge stereotypical narratives of transgender lives and elevate the stories that transgender people wish to tell about their own bodies, pregnancies, and reproductive decisions.

Forel Kourouma ​| Division III Project
NKO Abroad
Forel Kourouma is developing a summer internship program, NKO Abroad, that offers a platform for U.S. university and college students to work with local entrepreneurs in Touba, Senegal on pre-established businesses, using a framework of Asset-Based Community Development. Through collaboration between these entrepreneurs and student interns, he hopes to subvert the extractive culture of “voluntourism”, and create a unique relationship-building opportunity for students to learn directly from entrepreneurs’ experiences of commerce and development in Touba.

Hannah Davidson ​| Division III Research
Situating Postpartum Knowledge(s): Maternal and Provider Understandings of Postpartum Depression
Hannah Davidson will interview parents, physicians, and behavioral health providers on their experiences with postpartum depression as a diagnostic category, mental illness, and vulnerable period of human growth and transition. Through the lenses of reproductive justice and critical ethnography, this investigation will expand the frame of postpartum depression, inviting in the wider context of identity, isolation, access to resources, environment, and cultural narratives of motherhood. Hannah hopes this work will contribute toward building a more intersectional understanding of postpartum experiences and mapping future directions and nodes of inquiry for mental health work in the fourth trimester.

Joseph Newlin ​| Division III Project
Make Shift Coffee House: Creating Shared Understanding Across Political Divides
Joseph Newlin is partnering with Make Shift Coffee House to host a community event in Lewiston, ME that aims to build bridges across political divides through food, music, and face-to-face conversation. Through intergroup dialogue and culinary diplomacy, he hopes to bring people across the political spectrum together at the table to discuss civic issues in a guided format with the purpose of listening to and understanding one another across potentially vast differences.

Jules Petersen ​| Division III Project
Facilitators Weaving
Jules Petersen will create a three-day residency at Hampshire College for students interested in the art of group facilitation. Participants will share their practices and learn from each other’s skills and experiences leading effective meetings and workshops. The residency will focus on the dynamics of the group learning process, communication design, and the powerful potential of collaboration to produce creative space-making and healthy dialogue.

Mercedes Loving-Manley ​| Division III Project
City Limits: Black queer & trans life in Boston, MA
In ​City Limits,​ a photo & video series, Mercedes Loving-Manley will interview queer, trans, and gender non-conforming people of color about their lived experiences of surviving at these social intersections in Boston, MA. In addition to these interviews, she will research Black femme, queer, and trans existence throughout U.S. history, envisioning Black femme liberation by pinpointing underlying themes and methods of survival and resistance. Mercedes hopes the narrative she crafts will serve as an archive by and for Black queer communities in Boston, and that it will be used as a resource for city policymakers to provide safer communities.

Moira Tan ​| Division III Research
Litigation and Legislation: State Responses to the Overturning of Roe v. Wade (1973)
Moira Tan will be investigating abortion laws within the United States and the various levels of access to abortion experienced by people throughout the country. In partnership with the National Network of Abortion Funds, Moira will lead a Heart to Heart Abortion dialogue on campus, opening space to challenge myths and assumptions and learn facts about abortion access. As a New York State Political Intern at the National Institute of Reproductive Health, Moira will be exploring the possibility of a post-Roe v. Wade political landscape and its impact.

Nadia Issa ​| Division III Research
To’ Iban Eshu: Spiritual Reparations in Regla de Ocha-Ifá and other Black Caribbean Diasporic Traditions
Nadia Issa is producing auto-ethnographic work at the intersections of African-diasporic spiritual and religious traditions, reparations theory, dance, and music. From their extensive research in Cuba on the religion of Regla de Ocha-Ifá, they are working to expand reparation politics to make a case for spiritual reparations. They hope to highlight the ways in which Black spirituality and religions have been targeted and suppressed, and the historical violences that practitioners confront within the Black Caribbean Diaspora. They will share their findings through a performance incorporating dance and music from Yoruba traditions.

Quinn Davis and Aidn James ​| Collaborative Division III Project
Intimacy in Motion
Quinn Davis and Aidn James will co-create a multidisciplinary arts Division III project, including a series of collaborative learning spaces culminating in a performance,​Intimacy in Motion.​ They aim to honor the unique voices of their creative ensemble, while creating a community that sees individuals as part of a collective. They will investigate the conditions that allow people to create their own intentional communities, moving at the speed of trust to ensure that all members are valued, and ultimately celebrating their shared learning process through reflection and performance.

Fall 2017

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 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 seven 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 US. 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 counter misrepresentation 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 black women playwrights and will direct, slot, and act in one of their plays alongside black marginalized students at Hampshire in order to depict blackness in diverse and holistic ways as a positive opposing narrative to those negative ones that already exist about black people in art and media. Nisaa will partner with a local community organization to bring black marginalized youth to one of her shows and will be using Theatre of the Oppressed methodologies to call people in to build consciousness and creativity in pushing back against oppressive systems.

Noa Coffey-Moore, Division III Project: Black Femme Survival. Noa Coffey-Moore will be creating a social justice 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 community and resources for young femmes of color in need of support with survival and resilience.

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 on-going 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 all 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 asks how does the trauma of displacement and loss of place manifest in the body, and how does this affect emotional experience of the world, culture, and community? 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 capture the young women of color in the Community Dance Program of the Embodied Leadership Project. 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.

Fall 2016

Ande Clemens, Division III Research: Radical Cartography of Lead (Pb). Ande will conduct interviews with local gardeners and farmers and test food cultivation sites for lead (Pb) contamination. They will transform their data into an interactive map installation aimed to catalyze action around environmental racism, soil contamination, the ethics of food production, and the ecological potentials for urban food sovereignty.

Andrea Wong, Division III Research: Disguised Distress in Asia’s Saving Face Culture: Self-Concealment and Perfectionistic Self-Presentation as Potential Mediators of Anxiety and Depression among Asian Youth. A mixed-methods clinical psychology study investigating experiences of disguised distress among Asian youth. Andrea will present her preliminary research into the relationship between cultural barriers to accessing emotional health support and maladaptive perfectionism at the 2017 CUDCP Diversifying Clinical Psychology Event in San Diego, CA.

Emily Rose Brown, Division III Project: Embodiment. This portrait series features images of community members who are working in collaboration with Emily Rose to create images of visual protest, sharing the ways their bodies, lives, and identities are filled with strength, pride, and aliveness in a culture of violence, exploitation, and misrepresentation.
Eri Svenson, Division II Field Study: Tibetan Studies in India. Eri will be attending a Tibetan Studies program in India through the Five College Exchange Program. During their field study, Eri will engage with the Tibetan exile community’s ethical and spiritual commitments and see first hand what justice frameworks and restorative practice can look like in the context of conflict and migration.

Fangzhou Zhu, Division III Project: Being Away: Photographing International Students in Their Space. Fangzhou is creating photographs of international students in the Five College Consortium, collaborating with her subjects to tell their own stories by taking their pictures in a place where they feel a sense of belonging and comfort, opening dialogue about their experience of studying abroad, isolation and connection, and the meaning of home.

Forel Kourouma, Division II Field Study: New African Diasporas. Forel will travel to Senegal, Italy, and China as he studies transnational communities, cultures, and economies emerging from contemporary migration in the African Islamic diaspora. This field study with the School for International Training will deepen his ongoing work in Africana Studies, social entrepreneurship, and technology, and prepare him for a planned self-designed field study in the future.

Graciela Rodriguez Carmona, Division II Field Study: Trajectories of a Caribbean Artist: Artistic Expression in 21st Century Cuba. Graciela will create an ethnographic documentary film focused on the lives of Cuban artists who see their art as activism. She will weave stories of the intersections of daily life, identity, politics, and artistic expression in by tracing everyday spaces, encounters, and processes of the artists she meets on field study.

Jennifer Maxwell, Division III Project: One Step Forward. Jennifer is creating a short animated film that will use storytelling to address stigma surrounding mental illness. She will travel to more than 50 recovery and support groups in the region and invite others with lived experience of mental illness to collaborate with her by drawing on one frame of the film, which she will re-assemble into the final product.

Kira deCoudres, Division III Project: Methods of Ontological Remix. Kira will bring a series of artists, scientists, and innovators to campus to present interactive, performative, experimental lecture-labs. In this project, the “remix” sparks community engagement in the many complex layers of being a human in the present and future, supported by a socially-engaged ensemble of visitors working between art, technology, and biology.

Makenna Finch, Division II Field Course: Intensive Dance Therapy. Makenna will expand her studies of dance as a modality for individual and collective healing by participating in an intensive course in dance therapy. She will bring her learning back to campus by collaborating on the creation of embodied and resonant community spaces for healing through movement.

Michelle Falcon, Division III Field Study: Esclavitud, Dependencia, Liberación. Michelle is creating a short documentary to raise awareness about the current economic crisis in Puerto Rico. The film will shed light on the details of the crisis, the role the U.S. has played, show the impact on individuals and families, and shed light on potential paths forward.
Mikaela Gonzalez, Division III Project: Campus Mural: Wall of SOURCE Healing and Resilience. Mikaela plans to facilitate a collective mural making process by and for the SOURCE community on campus, bringing students of color together to envision and create a permanent public mural as an intentional act of community building for resilience in the present and future.

Rene Pedraza, Division II Project: Cuban Women: Art as Mental Health, Social Development, and Cultural Progress. This field study in Miami and Havana will yield a series of video interviews and photographs with female-identified Cuban artists across creative fields, carrying the story of art as a medium for survival, healing, and self-expression amid experiences of exile and exodus.

Rikkia Pereira, Division III Project: Remembering the Body. A choreographic process aimed at building balance between Rikkia’s own artistic vision and her vision of dance as a vehicle for community transformation and social justice. Rikkia has been invited to present her research at the 2017 American College Dance Association Regional Conference, and will lead an ensemble of Hampshire students to present a full performance of her work in the spring.

Sara Berliner, Division III Project: Student Teaching in Theatre Classrooms. As part of obtaining her theatre teaching licensure through the Mt. Holyoke Licensure program, Sara will be completing observation and facilitation in schools under the mentorship of currently licensed teachers working with a variety of ages. As a student who was influenced significantly by theatre in high school herself, Sara believes in the power and necessity of theatre in public schools, where it is accessible to those who most benefit from it.

Sheila Brown, Division II Field Study: An Exploration of Birth and Women’s Empowerment in Mexico. Sheila will be traveling to San Cristobal de las Casas, Mexico to volunteer at Luna Maya Chiapas, a birth clinic that promotes safe, healthy, and empowering pregnancy and birth. This field study will support her ongoing studies in reproductive justice, birth work, and holistic healthcare.

Tenzin Sangpo, Division II Project: A Study on the Status of Mental Health Care in Tibetan Refugee Communities Located in Northern Parts of India. While in India, Tenzin will visit three main centers that provide health care to Tibetan refugees as well as several monastic institutions. Tenzin will conduct interviews to illuminate the role of society, economic, religious tradition, and political situation in determining the mental health of people living in a community.

Victoria Lee, Division III Project: Sleep Safe Pod. The Sleep Safe Pod will be a prototype of a mobile, insulated sleeping pod intended to shelter individuals experiencing homelessness from the freezing temperatures winter can bring. Victoria will design and fabricate the Sleep Safe Pod to be low-cost, made from as many reused materials as possible, environmentally sustainable, and designed with the specific needs of the homeless community in mind.

Spring 2016

Kendall Artz, Division II Research: Ethnographic research in U.S. and Germany focusing on the consequences of cultural appropriation of “tribalism” by white American and European groups, situating this appropriation as a continuation of colonial practices of dispossession and marginalization.

Kamika Bennett, Division III Research: An investigation of the experiences of racialized criminalization and deportation of Jamaican im/migrants in the U.S., examining through interviews the connections between state policies around the “War on Drugs” and state policies around immigration, and connecting these to larger histories of racialization and economic exploitation.

Maya Berenholz, Division III Project: They Didn’t Know We Were Seeds: Growing Heart-Centered Movements from the Ground Up, is a zine and collective art show gathering a collection of stories from a year of exploring what resiliency means in the context of movement-building through interviewing local change-makers on and off campus.

April Dunlop, Division III Project: April’s work focuses on supporting LGBTQIA people through storytelling and spirituality. She will develop a writer’s group for local emerging queer and trans writers. She is also writing a YA novel about a young person understanding herself as a queer witch. Both projects draw on the power of creativity and spirituality to create community, strength, and visibility.

Dylan Fitzwater, Division III Research: Dylan has been invited back to the Zapatista Language School in Chiapas, Mexico to participate in their 15th anniversary celebration, and will be sharing his work inspired by an ECG-funded placement at the school last summer. Dylan’s thesis focuses on the contemporary practices of autonomous government of the Zapatista movement through the lens of several political categories unique to the Mayan language Tsotsil, which is spoken in the highlands region of Zapatista territory.

Sackona Fitts, Division III Research: A field study at Sa Sa Art Projects located in The White Building in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Sackona is taking art classes instructed in Khmer, and assisting with The White Building Archival Project, documenting the history and artwork of this unique housing complex created in 1963 and reunited by a community of artists after the Pol Pot regime. Sackona is researching, photographing, and filming stories of genocide survivors, including her family members in Cambodia.

Dykee Gorrell, Division III Research: Dykee is traveling to Durban, South Africa to study nation building, reconciliation, memory, and development, and conduct interviews on people’s experiences with the political history of South Africa during and post-Apartheid.

Abbas Hirji, Division III Research: A field study on the effects of climate changes on farmers and nomads in northeast Tanzania through a watershed perspective, analyzing the hydrologic aspects of the Pangani River Basin.

Nadia Issa, Division I Project: Nadia is training as a doula in the Full-Circle Doula Training by the International Center for Traditional Childbearing in Boston, MA. This organization centers Black women and tackles the infant mortality gap through education and training.

Tika Lifton-Herman, Division III Research/Project: Tika is crafting a narrative poem/story/essay that critically and reflectively explores her connection to, reading of, interaction with and contribution to the online accessibility of two books written by Native American women between 1886-1916 and now housed in the Amherst College archives.

Fall 2015

Maresol Gurevitz, Division III Project: ¡Jessie Vive! is a documentary project about Jessie Hernandez, a 17-year-old queer Latinx who was murdered by the Denver Police in January of 2015. Combining digital media in the form of documentary videography with critical pedagogy to prioritize the voices and stories of queer youth of color, Maresol is working with Jessie’s family to honor their stories and follow their lead in remembering Jessie’s life.

Omnia Hamdan, Division III Project: No Address At the Ghost House is a non-fiction narrative based on oral histories of state repression in 1990’s Sudan to communicate the brutal history of the Omar Al-Bashir dictatorship and make legible the lessons of this generation of activists to a wide audience. This work is primarily based on the words of survivors, and the stories, hopes, and lessons that they feel the world needs to hear.

Jamila Jackson and Rikkia Pereira, a collaborative Division III and Division II Project: (So)ul Connected: Community Education through Dance is a project dedicated to using a body-centered approach to act as a model for healthy community. Using exercises and games to bring attention to the body, collaborators Jamila and Rikkia bring Amherst High School students to Hampshire campus to explore ways to create connection, build sustainable community, and practice an embodied approach to self-empowerment.

Emily Keppler, Division III Project: Pasamontaña: A Zapatista Graphic Novel aims to provide an accessible and engaging resource for organizers, activists, and educators to learn about the history and strategies of the Zapatista movement, as well as to give insight into the worldview and values shared by Zapatista communities.

Cory Blair Seyler, Division III Project: Soul Portraits is a study of activists who share a relationship to the Five College area of Western Massachusetts. The study consists of conversations, interviews, and collaborations to create portraits of participating social justice leaders. Community meals and a publication of the participants’ reflections will accompany the portraits and expand the dialogue between Cory and participants.

Adisa Stewart, Division III Project: Somatic Impact of Black Lives’ Trauma: Resisting and Transforming Embodied Oppression as Descendants of Enslaved Africans. Through partnership and training with Oakland-based Generative Somatics, Adisa explores how culturally relevant healing practices can build the capacity to resist and transform state violence and trauma in the ongoing fight for Black liberation and systemic change.

Xavier Torres de Janon, Division III Project: Racialization and Persecution of ‘Latin@’ and ‘Muslim’ Bodies under U.S. Security Systems is a collection of stories that show how law and security apparatuses have worked to racially monitor and control Latin@ and Muslim populations, regardless of actual intentions, innocence or histories.

Summer 2015

Dylan Fitzwater, Division II/III Research: Attended the Zapatista Escuelita and conducted research on the development of the Escuelita as a site for exchange and collaboration between the Zapatistas and outside individuals and groups.

Elizabeth Kleisner, Division III Research: Participated in Body & Earth, a weeklong training that cultivates an embodied and empathic approach to engaging ourselves, each other and our environment.

Grusha Sai Prasad, Division II Project: Led workshops and presentations on cognitive science and experimental design with young people at schools in Bengaluru, India.

John Sinclair, Division II Project: Worked with a rotating group of artists and performers to establish a summer residency program in Bonner County, Idaho that offers a community-based and affordable alternative to artists to other institutional residency programs.

Aurelis Troncoso, Division II Project: Collaborated with mirArte diaDia, a community based arts and culture organization in Havana, Cuba to curate Addimu pa’ mi, a celebration of neo-african art that makes visible and honors African ancestry.

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