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W
Going
hether it’s mining the past, polling the campus community or testing the waters (literally), placebased student-faculty research and experiential learning is thriving at Dickinson. If you were to take Assistant Professor of English Siobhan Phillips’ course Writing About Food, you might write about volunteering at the local food bank, Project SHARE, founded by Elaine Livas ’83. Or consider the multitude of projects conducted every summer at or for the College Farm, such as building a crop-rotation algorithm. There’s so much happening at the farm now that there’s a student-faculty team creating a database of all those research projects. For indomitable faculty members Maria Bruno, Andy Skelton and Amy Witter and their students in the following three stories, that research can get a bit messy and unpredictable, whether it’s delayed by an unusually fierce winter followed by a long mud season or the work launches a rhetoric war because the study results might have a negative impact on a particular industry. What ties these disparate disciplines and personalities together, though, is their focus on going local in deep and thoughtful ways, with longterm consequences, such as leading the campus community toward carbon neutrality. Or changing the way we coat our driveways. Or even rethinking how we think about research.
By Michelle Simmons
Photography by Carl Socolow ’77
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