Programs and Partnerships
As a community-focused scholar and program manager, I work to develop and support collaborative partnerships and student programming opportunities that employ reciprocal and engaged methods for research and creative discovery.
As the Southern Futures Assistant Director at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I manage the undergraduate Southern Futures Fellows program, which supports creative and critical research projects in the arts and humanities that seek to address community-based challenges across the region. The Southern Futures initiative also provides mentorship and funding opportunities to graduate students and actively supports campus and community partnerships to build connections, share resources, and tackle regional challenges.
As a Postdoctoral Associate with the University of Minnesota’s Liberal Arts Engagement Hub, I worked to ensure that community partners both had a voice in shaping our programmatic offerings and that they were financially compensated for their collaboration and contribution through the development of a Community Programming Design Team, an Annual Visionary Leader partnership program, and an engagement course partnering program and grant opportunity.
In my own research practice as an ethnographer, I also use collaborative and engaged methods to build and maintain reciprocal relationships with community partners. Recently, I collaborated with the Center for Biological Diversity and the Wyoming East High School Friends of the Earth student group to create an endangered species mural about the Guyandotte crayfish in Wyoming County, West Virginia. To celebrate the mural and share information about the endangered crayfish, which only exists in Wyoming County, we also hosted a community event with speakers, refreshments, and environmental and community-based organizations. As some communities in this county are currently facing water contamination issues, we also set up a station to collect drinking water donations and raise awareness about the water challenges.
