Congratulations Award Winners! 2022-2023 Graduate Fellowships & Seed Funding Awardees

The R.H. Mallory Center for Community Geography is pleased to announce the awardees for the Graduate Fellowship for Community Engagement and Seed Funding for Community Engaged Classrooms for 2022-2023. Each year our Center awards funding to students and faculty to explore community-engaged research and teaching. Our awardees will use their $1,000 awards for the following projects:

Joshua Driscol's "Albuquerque Overlap Map" project is focused on creating a web-based data aggregator for Albuquerque, New Mexico and the surrounding region. He hopes that the site can serve as a communal resource for data, but also as a place where people can make maps and explore different datasets. Joshua’s project operates from the premise that spatial questions are better answered when paired with a visual component. His goal is to host as many open-source datasets in JSON format as possible (converting from GeoTIFF, KMZ, SHP, etc) so that community members can use the map to visualize community characteristics intuitively. Joshua is a master's student in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies.

Cassidy Tawse-Garcia’s project “Alternative Agriculture and Mutual Aid in the South Valley of Albuquerque in Response to the Covid-19 Pandemic: Social and Ecological Resourcefulness in a Shifting World” is focused on understanding how mutual aid influences the “resourcefulness”of communities in response to social and ecological crisis, and how that is demonstrated through the politics of community care". Her project will develop a community inventory of existing mutual aid resources, to be shared with and utilized within the geographic area of Albuquerque’s South Valley. The inventory will combine graphics and maps visualizing resources. Cassidy is a doctoral student in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies.

Dr. Yolanda C. Lin received a seed funding award for community engagement in “Information Design for Science and Society” (GEOG 2115), a course in which students learn the basics of visual information design and then craft a set of data-driven infographics. Dr. Lin successfully implemented two community-engaged projects last year, and we are happy to support her again in this work. Students will again supports the City Nature Challenge, a citizen science event held every spring in Albuquerque and other cities around the world, by designing infographics and other materials.

Dr. Caitlin Lippitt received a seed funding to support ongoing work to connect students and faculty with current and potential research projects at Petroglyph National Monument. She will host a panel event in fall 2022 for Petroglyph/NPS staff to learn more about GES faculty/student research expertise and interests. The goal of the event is to promote future research collaborations between GES faculty and students and Petroglyph NM.

Further information about our ongoing projects is available here.