Thomas M. Hinckley, Sara Jo Breslow, Emma Flores, Stevan Harrell, and Regan Smith. University of Washington
The University of Washington's NSF
– IGERT ("Multinational Collaborations on Challenges to the Environment")
begins with a series of courses that are designed to build community among
participants and prepare graduate fellows for subsequent international
collaborations in environmental problem-solving. These courses focus on the
following four questions: (1) How do disciplines and their practitioners vary
according to epistemology and workplace culture? (2) What does it take to do
effective cross-disciplinary research, what models are currently available, and
can we envision our own models? (3) How do cultural, disciplinary, and institutional
identities influence our perceptions of the environment, and (4) What
constitutes effective and ethical multinational research in an unequal
world? This year's cohort of nine
PhD students, 3 student instructors and four faculty began the experience with
an eight day, intensive, placed-based field trip in Washington and British
Columbia that revolved around discussions with stakeholders representing
different perspectives on shared environmental problems between the US and
Canada. Students adopt lessons
learned from the Canada-U.S. trip and coursework to craft and implement a pilot
study on management of invasive species in New Zealand and to address
human-land use history in a national park in China.
