Theme: Community driven and engaged scholarship: Amplifying impact and engaging diverse knowledge systems

We integrated our positionality and personal narratives into each of our individual research presentations this semester. We shared an on-going research project and used the Critical Response Process to gather feedback on our work.  

Some of our favorite events included:  Attending the ESSA student symposium, learning about CRP, engaging with invited speakers and mentors (Vanos and Navarro-Perez), and attending other ASU community events (GFL, CAP student hour, etc.).

Theme: Doing values-based research and practice- personalizing and integrating ESSA core values. We aimed to integrate our positionality and personal narratives into each of our individual presentations this semester. This is the first semester where we individually shared our own research and asked for feedback from our classmates to personalize how we integrate the three core values of research into our work. 

Some of our favorite events included:  Attending the AISA conference IIITSE pilot cohort presentation (past - Edauri and Jorge), promoting and sharing ESSA work at Earth Day events in SRP-MIC and GRIC, and building community together. 

Theme: Transformative practices - diverse ways of knowing your research and meaning-making. After finishing the Spring 2022 semester, we found that the pace of the course (only one week per topic) was racing us through some critical concepts that needed time for longer discussions and more depth. During this semester, each student team led two separate weeks of the course focused on three discussion topics: Food sovereignty, Indigenous perspectives on fire ecology, and Just transformations in local communities. 

Some of our favorite events included:  a virtual discussion with Pollution is Colonialism author, Dr. Liboiron, held at the Labriola Data Center, meeting with our ESSA mentors, and using creative tools to reflect on readings in class.  

Theme: Bringing theory to practice. After finishing the fall 2021 semester, we realized that while we had learned a lot of abstract or theoretical approaches to team science and collaboration (see case studies and scenario planning below) we were missing ideas about how to put this into practice. As a group, we decided to bring in more guest lecturers (from across ASU, Toolbox Dialogue Initiative, Northwest Indian College, etc.) and critically reflect on our research methods and styles. Some of our favorite tools included: exquisite corpse poems, TDI initiative, and ALL the resources shared by the Labriola Data Center. 

Theme: Place-based learning. As we recognize the global effects of a changing world, what are the aspects we can disentangle at the local level? By situating our research questions in place, we use this seminar to explore language/meaning, collaborative planning, inequity and justice (focused on heat in Phoenix), power in governance structures, climate refugee challenges, science fiction, and more! 

Our first ever ESSA RRS launched in Spring 2021! Formerly referred to as ESSA reading group, this RRS had a broad theme: transdisciplinary research, team science, collaboration, and communication.  This seminar is intended to build community for a network of graduate scholars interested in centering JEDI (justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion) in their research while addressing problems of the Anthropocene.