Community Partners
HATCH is happy to announce the recipients of our feminist “experiment” grants for graduate students. The projects below challenge traditional disciplinary methodologies, are interdisciplinary in nature, and further social justice goals through their knowledge-seeking practice.
Knights Landing Environmental Health Project
The Knights Landing Environmental Health Project was initiated in response to community concerns about cancer and possible environmental health risks in the small agricultural town of Knights Landing, CA. Our research team includes both UC Davis students and community health promoters (promotoras). Concerns about mental health and the rates of substance abuse (legal and illicit) frequently arose over our year of interactions with community members. The experiment we propose for this funding is a mental health assessment for Knights Landing residents to identify underlying differences between smoker and never smoker subpopulations.
Contact: Skye Kelty, PhD Candidate in Pharmacology and Toxicology, jkelty@ucdavis.edu, work address is Center for Health and the Environment
Towards Gender & Social Equity in the Design of Agricultural Technologies: Testing a Ugandan Student-Led Learning and Innovation Approach
This project develops an experimental student-led learning program in Uganda that practically addresses gender and social equity in agricultural technology design while training students to engage farmers in participatory processes of innovation. Working with faculty and students in Busitema University’s agricultural mechanization and irrigation engineering program, small-scale farmers, and local coordinators, our “experiment” includes workshops, field visits, and other collective design opportunities for both students and farmers. We center social equity in the technical design processes, challenge traditional agricultural education spaces, and directly apply a collaborative, de-centralized knowledge-making practice through student facilitation.
Contact: Julia Jordan, Master’s student in International Agricultural Development, jdjordan@ucdavis.edu
Building Community Ferment
Building Community Ferment is an experiment in public engagement, interdisciplinary collaboration, and art/food-making practice. Stephanie Maroney (Cultural Studies, UC Davis) and visual artist S.E. Nash (Kansas City Art Institute) have worked together on several projects related to food, fermentation, feminism, and community-building. In this experiment, Maroney and Nash will facilitate two events in May 2018: a public fermentation project in the City of Davis and an artist’s talk at UC Davis. Both events develop a feminist politics of fermentation—instead of a politics of purity—to generate ways of being in the world that eschew boundary making, control, and individualist understandings of health.
Contact: Stephanie Maroney, PhD candidate in Cultural Studies, srmaroney@ucdavis.edu
Asking for a Pause: Slow Reading Audre Lorde’s Cancer Journals
The aim of our project is to slow read Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals through a practice centered on developing multiple embodied approaches to thinking with and accessing text. Slow reading asks us to pause with the page, to engage with the page both as object and idea, to remember ourselves as readers with bodies, and to feel what spaces in the text open up when we stay with it. We are part of an existing community of artist-scholar practitioners who will facilitate workshops in mediums from poetry to dance that show how slow reading The Cancer Journals might look, feel, and even taste.
Friday May 4th from 12 pm to 3pm :
Guided workshop on cut-up poetry @ Solano Community Center
Saturday May 5th from 12pm to 3pm :
Zine Making and Discussion @ Nelson Hall (aka Della Davidson Studio)
Combining poetry and disabled embodied practice, we will facilitate a workshop on cut-up poetry. We will slow down with Lorde, thinking around amputation and prosthesis while rethinking the jagged edges, possibilities, and limitations of cut-up poetry in conversation with the text. We will make cut-up poems from medical journals on breast and liver cancer published in the latter half of the 1970s. We will use this process as a method for reading withLorde’s text. Please come having read chapters I and II if you can.
Please RSVP IF POSSIBLE and share widely.
Contact: Jessica Stokes, jsstokes@ucdavis.edu, and Arielle Estrada Sol, aestradasol@ucdavis.edu