The Senior Comprehensive Exercise provides an opportunity for students at Carleton to engage deeply with a topic of their choice by conducting their own research and sharing their process and the results of their work with their peers and professors. While all Comps projects are inevitably shared with the broader Carleton community, some students choose to make their work even more public, often by working with non-profit or other community organizations or sharing their project and findings with communities beyond Carleton. Natalie Jacobson, an American Studies major; Naomi Borowski; and Flora Richey, both Sociology/Anthropology majors, all chose to engage in this type of research.
Each of their Comps projects exemplify public scholarship in unique and varying ways, whether it’s through a personal civic engagement project turned Comps, in the case of Natalie, critical research intended to change a public institution, in the case of Naomi, or academic engagement with a public space, in the case of Flora.
American Bounty, American Hunger: Bridging the Gap between Food Abundance and Food Scarcity in Northfield, Minnesota – Natalie Jacobson
When Natalie Jacobson learned that there was a Civic Engagement option for the American Studies Comps, she jumped at the opportunity. Nevertheless, in searching through the archives of past AMST Comps, she found only one example. Without much of a framework, Natalie struck out on her own. Reflecting on her Carleton experience, she considered the impact of her involvement with the Food Recovery Network (FRN) and other projects that got her out into the community. With this in mind, she developed a two-part project: The first part is a report on the state of food waste and food insecurity in Northfield and Faribault, and the second is an academic essay that grounds the project in American Studies Scholarship. The report is based on interviews with 36 people in three different stakeholder categories: (1) people that work in social service organizations in Northfield and Faribault who work directly with food insecure populations; (2) people who own or work for food businesses in Northfield; and (3) people who lead food recovery organizations in the state of Minnesota and other parts of the country. Natalie explained, “my report highlights work that is already being done in the community, some issues and gaps that remain and I end with a list of recommendations of how various stakeholders in the community might be able to move forward on some of these issues.” Beyond informing Carleton’s FRN and many of the CCCE’s other food-related projects, Natalie plans to circulate the report to the Northfield Chamber of Commerce and the local Environmental Quality Commission. She also hopes to post it on the Greater Northfield Sustainability Website and the National Food Recovery Network’s Website.
Transcending Wilderness-Out-There – Naomi Borowski
For her Sociology and Anthropology Comps, Naomi Borowski drew on work with outdoor education organizations in Minnesota to explore how racial identity influences relationships to the outdoors. Her research revealed that while the outdoor industry considers itself a “progressive” site that promotes diversity and inclusion, outdoor education organizations often unintentionally amplify a dominant white paradigm of wilderness. Naomi explained, “my research shows the importance of reviving, finding and including other narratives of being outside by documenting the ways in which non-dominant narratives are systematically erased and silenced by outdoors institutions that harbor a wilderness narrative based on white values.” With principles of Academic Civic Engagement in mind, Naomi synthesized her research into a list of concrete recommendations for summer camps and outdoor organizations in reimagining future projects and programming to be more inclusive. When her project was complete, she circulated it among her informants and the community partners that she worked with, many of whom have expressed interest in using the findings to develop curriculum and make changes to their organizations. Naomi asserted how Comps provides a unique opportunity for civic engagement and public scholarship, “we spend so much time working on one topic for comps, and for me, it makes sense to have that energy go towards creating something that is needed and useful to a community partner.”
Paradox in Akademia: Senses of Place in the Cowling Arboretum – Flora Richey
Originally, Flora Richey did not intend for her Sociology/Anthropology Comps to be a form of public scholarship. Through surveys and interviews with Carleton students and Nancy Braker, Carleton’s Arboretum Director, Flora’s research examines senses of place within the Cowling Arboretum, exploring the varying ways in which it is conceived of and used as a natural space. In analyzing her data, she found the ways that students think about the Arboretum are characterized by several paradoxes: the paradox of institutional association (students thought of the Arb as both intrinsically connected to their Carleton experience, and as a place to get away from Carleton), authenticity (many students saw the Arb as truly “authentic,” while also recognizing its constructed aspects) and concern and responsibility (students expressed general concern for the state of the environment, but did not apply this sense of environmental responsibility to the Arb itself). Flora noted her initial ambivalence in thinking about her project as a form of public scholarship, elaborating that: “so often we think of public scholarship as needing to address these kind of big, community issues, or inequities or injustices,” while her project is really more about “engaging with a public resource and engaging somewhat of a public audience.” She hopes that by demonstrating that there are multiple ways of knowing a space, this kind of public, sense of place research can expand our understanding of those spaces and lead to more enduring and inclusive interactions with natural spaces at large.
In her next endeavor working with a kids’ bike camp in Portland, Flora seeks to utilize these new frameworks of thinking about natural spaces. Reflecting on her project, she shares: “I think it has really helped me think about outdoor spaces differently. I think there’s this privileging of certain different kinds of nature that I’ve definitely taken part in, growing up in Colorado, where I had access to mountain trails and the Rocky Mountain National Park whenever I wanted. Seeing the value in a park, or in an arboretum, or just sitting outside right now, feels like this untapped resource, and I’m looking forward to sharing that with the kids that I’m engaging with. I’m not certain that you can fully inhabit other ways of knowing things, but I think that allowing yourself the potential to consider that is a really liberating and exciting thing.” Flora’s Comps will soon be posted publicly on the Cowling Arboretum website.