The Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck Undergraduate Summer Research Fellowship, supported by the Mellon Foundation “Humanities for All Times” initiative, invites applications for funding and research support for undergraduate students and faculty engaged in summer research during Summer 2024.

Projects proposed during Rethinking Place’s three-year sequence of articulated themes should respond to the corresponding year’s frame. This year (2024), the Rethinking Place Summer Research Fellowships Committee invites students and faculty sponsors to respond to the theme of “Food & Memory.”

Here, potential frameworks are questions of land and food as an avenue for social justice (in food sovereignty, rematriation, foodways revitalization), as a living archive (in cookbooks, works of food history, seed relations, writings and theory about naming and classifying our environments), or as kinetic, organic material for creation (in material or land-based projects), and includes exploration of both cultivated and and non-cultivated varietals. 

Regardless of theme, however, the main emphasis for the summer research fellowships for the life of the grant will be on faculty and students innovating together in research, designing appropriate language to address history and memory, and engaging spatial design principles to highlight the multiple ways in which marginalized communities experience space, whether on campus or elsewhere.

Rethinking Place affirms Bard’s tangible commitments to the principles and ideals of the college’s 2020 land acknowledgment by recognizing the fundamental need to address historical erasure and make space for previously-marginalized epistemologies. With this call for student-faculty summer research proposals, we wish to build on the ample set of practices extant at Bard that encourage students to engage in “making meaning” through the bread-and-butter tools of humanistic pursuits: attentive and immersive reading, critical engagement with archives and primary sources—and the construction of those archives and sources, experimental performance, writing and revision, and collaboration among peers.

 

Residential Research Project Guidelines

The Rethinking Place Residential Research Grant can support a broad range of proposed research projects as long as such projects are rooted in humanities methods. Suggestions for what types of projects the grant could support include, but are not limited to: work in Bard-based or other local archives regarding marginalized histories at Bard or in the surrounding area; conducting interviews pertaining to institutional relationships regarding Native engagement; seed-saving and rematriation projects; mapping and/or re-mapping projects; projects that center archiving as restorative practice and/or which investigate how institutional resources may be used to recover and center different types of stories or which imagine alternative forms of archives.

Research projects that emerge from a current or past class are welcome, but projects do not necessarily need to be the result of coursework.

Grantees will commit to a presentation or workshop at the annual Rethinking Place Conference. (Details of which to be provided later upon receipt.)

The Rethinking Place Grant can offer $4800, awarded to an individual project being undertaken at Bard’s Annandale campus. The faculty member overseeing the non-residential summer research fellowship would receive compensation at the rate of $2000 for the full research period. If more than one faculty member participates, this compensation will be divided evenly between the advisors.

Eligibility

All current Bard students, excepting graduating seniors, may apply for research funds. The faculty advisor may be any faculty member with an appointment to teach during the 2024-2025 academic year at Bard Annandale.

Application Procedure

Interested students should submit a proposal of between 250 and 500 words describing the research project, include a list of possible participants, a proposed timeline, and an itemized budget. Please provide an email of support from the proposed faculty advisor; the email should show evidence of a working plan of how the student will be supported in their research endeavor. Students should also submit a resumé, a CV, or describe relevant skills and/or courses and connections in support of the proposal.

 

Non-Residential Research Project Guidelines

The Rethinking Place Residential Research Grant can support a broad range of proposed research projects as long as such projects are rooted in humanities methods. Suggestions for what types of projects the grant could support include, but are not limited to: locally-based community knowledge-keeping and knowledge production in students’ home communities; archival or visual culture research in different locations; studied engagement with and deep reading within the literature of place, of placemaking methods, or place-based arts around a particular topic engaging the grant themes; and beyond. Research projects that emerge from a current or past class are welcome, but projects do not necessarily need to be the result of coursework.

Grantees will commit to a presentation or workshop at the annual Rethinking Place Conference. (Details of which to be provided later upon receipt.)

The Rethinking Place Grant can offer $4000, which can be awarded to a single individual’s project or can be divided between a team research group, dependent on need. The faculty member overseeing the non-residential summer research fellowship would receive compensation at the rate of $1200 for the full research period. If more than one faculty member participates, this compensation will be divided evenly between the advisors.

Eligibility

All current Bard students, excepting graduating seniors, may apply for research funds. The faculty advisor may be any faculty member with an appointment to teach during the 2024-2025 academic year at Bard Annandale.

Application Procedure

Interested students should submit a proposal of between 250 and 500 words describing the research project, include a list of possible participants, a proposed timeline, and an itemized budget. For team projects, please describe the roles for each team member in the proposal. Please provide an email of support from the proposed faculty advisor; the email should show evidence of a working plan of how the student will be supported in their research endeavor. Students should also submit a resumé, a CV, or describe relevant skills/and or courses and connections in support of the proposal.

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Past Projects

Hope: Butte, America

Hope: Butte, America (Non-Residential)

Hope: Butte, America, by Nine Reed-Mera, brought her to the town of Butte, Montana, known as “The Richest Hill in the World” for its copper. The abundant copper in the hill was used in electrical wires to bring light to the US in the age of electricity but was also used to make a huge portion of the bullets and guns for both World Wars. However rich the copper hill is, its history -one of miners, disasters, and impossible recoveries- is richer. Through preliminary interviews and access to the Butte Mining Archives (thanks to Audrey Jaap), Nine revealed a scary example of nonfiction dystopia; a tale of giant, conniving corporations, acid-melted shoelaces, and arsenic dust invading people’s attics. And right in the center of the dystopian town lies a giant pit of mine waste and sulfuric acid known as the Berkeley Pit. Within this extremely noxious pit, until very recently believed barren, lie newfound microbes that can target cancer and absorb toxic metals. Presently, Butte is a city on the edge. While a huge, unattainable bioremediation effort is led by its people, corporations are again trying to excavate new mines. Among these mining projects is The Sandfire Black Butte Copper Mine Project which the community has momentarily halted, although the company is nevertheless preparing the terrain for exploitation. If there is one place teetering on crucial decisions that will impact human and environmental justice, it’s Butte.

Placing Morrison Within, Beside, and Beyond the Text

Placing Morrison Within, Beside, and Beyond the Text (Residential) by Vivian Hoyden, is an exploration of Toni Morrison’s relationship with place and space: in her life, in her literature, and of the space that her papers are now housed in, the archive itself. Through research carried out in the Morrison Archives at Princeton University, as well as some additional research in the Random House files at the Columbia University archive, this project traces Morrison’s life as that of editor, author, friend, family member, and professor through many years and many places. Of particular interest was her relationship with Bard, where she taught for a few semesters in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This research navigates the complexity of her archive as well; as much as the archive is a place to deconstruct who Morrison was, the archive, and the countless librarians who maintain it, are at the same time constructing its own narrative of her. The tidy manilla folders do not tell the whole story. There are no cardboard boxes entitled “motherhood” and yet her sons, Harrison and Slade born in 1961 and 1965 respectively were central to her life. Neither do the folders communicate the sense of synchronicity: while now her editing work at Random house is in one box, her work as a professor in another, her work as a brilliant author in a third and so on, in reality, she was doing all at once. “Placing Morrison Within, Beside, and Beyond the Text” is ultimately an inquiry into the ways in which place and space impacted Morrison’s life and the ways in which it now influences our understanding of that life.

Tracing the Awakening of El Fukú: Sampling and Cultural Endurance Against Settler Colonialism

Tracing the Awakening of El Fukú: Sampling and Cultural Endurance Against Settler Colonialism (Residential), by Justin Paulino, examines the ways in which communities who have been dispossessed, eradicated, violently vanished and been in “la mierda ever since” conquistadors landed on lands that were never theirs, have maintained livelihood and endurance against white monstrous forces. Using the analysis of geographical locations, as well as expanding beyond the materiality of archives, Tracing the Awakening of El Fukú seeks to deeply listen and trace the erratic trajectory of “El Fukú”. Utilizing Pauline Oliveros’ theorization of Deep Listening, “Deep coupled with Listening or Deep Listening for me is learning to expand the perception of sounds to include the whole space/time continuum of sound— encountering the vastness and complexities as much as possible”. Deep Listening involves examining the historical fragments of misrepresentation, subjugation and turmoil that BIPOC groups face while imagining histories with the lack of access to archives. Sensory studies, decolonial studies and Black and Indigenous studies remain influential in the production of this project. Tracing the Awakening of El Fukú will dissect the remnants of El Fukú: an everlasting terror and curse set amongst the diasporic groups of Black, Indigenous, Latine reality with the (pre-)arrival of Columbus that was felt from the Antilles and Western Hemisphere in the Americas. There is no question for why Junot Diaz chooses to narrate the “centuries-old yet reverberating ‘screams’ of Africans and the death ‘banes’ and rattles of the Taino (Indigenous peoples) as the first utterances and manifestations of the Fukú”. As Tiffany Lethabo King states, “the Fukú represents how conquest lives on the tips of the tongues of the descendants of Indigenous and Black folks who are a part of the Dominican and African diaspora in the Americas”. Ultimately, the first soundscapes created by conquest in the “New World” were shaped by Indigenous and Black noise, disrupting the conquistador’s sonic color line. I argue that sampling encompasses deep listening, continuously maintaining resistance and endurance against El Fuku, “memory loss” and settler colonialism; those who have felt the wake of the Fuku and choose to sample become active agents disrupting time and space through the chopping of a sample, the scratching of a record and the soul searching that is found in digging the crates.

Deep Listening to Black Geographies: Identity Formulation through Black Cultural Production

Deep Listening to Black Geographies: Identity Formulation through Black Cultural Production (Non-Residential), by Tirzah Thomas: This project aims to explore the methods and philosophies utilized for Black place-making that centers cultural production. To work against minimizing Blackness into the symbolic, Black Geographies; as theorized by Katherine McKittrick and Clyde Woods, aims to surpass the limitations of place-making by introducing and normalizing different ways to produce and perceive Black places. Zandria Robinson and Marcus Anthony Hunter expand upon Black Geographies by centering Black cultural producers who have both impacted Black places and have been impacted by Black places. But often, Black culture and places are belittled, misinterpreted, and appropriated. Using the concept of Black geographies my project will surpass limitations of place-making and the efforts of historical erasure. My summer research which includes fieldwork within Washington D.C and New York City along with Charlas at Bard College extends on the literature of Black place-making. I argue that consuming and/or producing cultural products are all essential in place-making for Black communities.

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