Community-Based Research Fellowship

Faculty PI: Rebecca Tarlau

Community partners:

Instituto Agroecologico Latinoamericano (IALA) María Cano (Colombia);

Instituto Agroecologico Latinoamericano (IALA) Ixim Ulew (Nicaragua);

Instituto Agroecologico Latinoamericano Sembradoras de Esperanzas (Chile)

Project Title: Educating for Food Sovereignty: Social Movements, Sustainable Agriculture, and

Latin American Institutes of Agroecology

Fellowship Location: Remote

Description:

This participatory action research project analyzes the impact of sustainable agriculture education on agroecological knowledge and landscape change in Colombia, Chile, and Nicaragua. Agroecology is an approach to farming that promotes the transformation of the corporate food system, land access for small-scale farmer, Indigenous, and Afro-descendant communities, and sustainable forms of agricultural production. In Latin America, social movements are using popular education based on Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed as a tool to advance agroecology and food sovereignty, creating nine Latin American Institutes of Agroecology (IALAs) in eight countries. Although thousands of students have graduated from these IALAs over the past 15 years, there is no research documenting their impact. With our project partners we are exploring how three of the IALAs develop agroecological pedagogies to help students advance theory on sustainable agricultural production and to put that knowledge into practice. The findings from this research could lead to improved sustainable agricultural pedagogies that improve resilience to climate change and reduce environmentally unsound agricultural practices across the globe.

Over the past year, the project team has been engaging in comparative ethnography, social network analysis, geospatial techniques, and participatory video methodologies to explore how factors such as geography, economic and political context, gender, and ethnicity affect both pedagogy and the efficacy of agroecological education. 

Fellowship description:

Undergraduate Fellows may assist with several aspects of the project:

● Participation in virtual meetings with project partners.

● Developing digital graphics (in Spanish and/or English) that help to visualize the pedagogical approaches employed by the Latin American Institutes of Agroecology.

● Systematic literature review of articles (in Spanish and English) on agroecological education in Latin America and globally.

● Synthesis of documents (in Spanish) from the three Latin American Institutes of Agroecology; creating summary documents that analyze these primary sources. 

● Thematic coding of interviews (in Spanish) with educators and students at the Latin

American Institutes of Agroecology.

● Writing analytical summaries based on coding of interview data.

Required and preferred skills:

● Fluency or high proficiency in Spanish (required)

● Graphic design experience and/or web design (preferred)

● Interest in social movements, agrarian reform, and/or sustainable food systems (preferred)

● Interest in reimagining schools and higher education systems

Faculty PI: Grant Parker

Fellowship Location: Remote (in conversation with South African-based partners)

Project description:

South Africa has a rich tradition of museums. Parallel to a long-standing project of building a database of them, the born-digital Museum of Storytelling is a new initiative to curate first- person interviews. The idea is to focus on selected themes (e.g. the land; ecology; family; religion and spirituality; enslavement). We curate interviews that present the widest possible range of perspectives and experiences as part of multimedia digital exhibits. We seek the voices of community leaders, heritage professionals, artists and academics on topics related to heritage. However, it is not practically possible to visit all potential locations in person. Hence, our challenge will be to make a virtue of the constraints imposed by remote engagement, for example by website design: juxtaposing sound files with relevant images and documents. The goal: a digital platform offering multimedia content on an open-access basis. Resulting material will be made available to museums for use in situ or on their websites.

Fellowship description:

Undergraduate student interns will have the chance to help create this museum from scratch. Core tasks will be to help plan, design, conduct and curate a wide-ranging set of interviews. These will be conducted via zoom and audio-recorded via that medium. The resulting interviews will be edited as podcasts and housed on a custom-built website. Transcriptions may be a possibility (via Descript vel sim.) but are not central to current plans. Around the topics listed above, selected material will highlight the holdings of collaborating museums and generate digital exhibits for their use on-site.

Spring term preparation on campus will include: 

• deepening knowledge of Southern African history and heritage
• learning about existing and emerging digital resources, esp. basic audio tech
• consulting with campus resources such as Stanford University Libraries and the
• Stanford Storytelling Project

All these tasks – before and during summer – will take place in consultation with the faculty mentor.

Helpful experience (not required):

• interviewing
• audio editing incl. podcast creation
• background in any aspect of African history
• museum, heritage or archaeological fieldwork

Location: Remote or hybrid on Stanford campus

Faculty PIs: Alexander Key and Nora Barakat

Project Description:

The "Arab Futures and Pasts: Palestine+" Faculty Research Network is designed to motivate sustained scholarly engagement with the question of the Palestinian present - in the context of broader currents and comparative moments in the Arab world. 

Led by Alexander Key (Comp Lit) and Nora Barakat (History), the 2024-2025 Faculty Research Network (FRN) "Arab Futures and Pasts: Palestine+" focuses on questions of power and politics, with an eye to histories of colonialism and extraction but a core focus on the current moment of genocide, scholasticide, extensive destruction of the built environment, the upending of Palestinian political and social organizations and the new regional and global structures that are emerging.

"Arab Futures and Pasts: Palestine+” aims to synthesize, integrate and clarify concepts germane to Palestinian identity and politics, Islam and the secular in North America and the Arab world, and the relationship between agency and scholarship. This network will pursue events and activities that seek to build capacity across Stanford communities (faculty, students, staff) on these concepts, promote a deliberative culture about these ideas and histories, and disseminate historical and contemporary debates and developments about these concepts. Winter and Spring 2025 activities will include discussions with a series of key interlocutors including Tareq Baconi on Palestinian identity and politics and Sherman Jackson on Islam and the secular.  Events for this FRN are supported by the Research Institute of CCSRE, the Middle Eastern Studies Forum, and the Department of Comparative Literature, among others.

Fellowship description:

Project to be determined in consultation with the Faculty PIs.

Preferred skills and experience:

• Proficiency in applicable languages
• Research and writing for a range of audiences