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Bronx Community College and SLC will collaborate to bring together the humanities with science for a diverse student body
Bronx Community College and Sarah Lawrence College have been awarded a $1.5million grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for a three-year grant to rethink the humanities and develop creative, collaborative pedagogies for the climate crisis. This award is the largest in Sarah Lawrence history. It was previously held by a Mellon Foundation grant for civic engagement of $1.2million, which the College received back in 2019.
“We are incredibly grateful for this grant and for the continued support from the Mellon Foundation,” said Sarah Lawrence president Cristle Collins Judd. “It recognizes not only the urgency and need for action around the climate crisis and environmental justice, but also the value of and need for the humanities in all areas of our lives. And it’s a clear vote of confidence in the innovative work of our faculty and students.”
Sarah Lawrence is one of 12 liberal arts colleges to be selected from 50 applicants to the Mellon Foundation’s Humanities for All Times initiative, and the College’s $1.5 million award represents the highest amount an institution could receive. Humanities for All Times was created by the Mellon Foundation to “support newly developed curricula that both instruct students in methods of humanities practice and demonstrate those methods’ relevance to broader social justice pursuits.”
“The Humanities for All Times initiative underscores that it’s not only critical to show students that the humanities improve the quality of their everyday lives, but also that they are a crucial tool in efforts to bring about meaningful progressive change in the world,” said Phillip Brian Harper, Mellon Foundation Higher Learning Program Director. “We are thrilled to support this work at liberal arts colleges across the country – given their unequivocal commitment to humanities-based knowledge, and their close ties to the local communities in which such knowledge can be put to immediate productive use, we know that these schools are perfectly positioned to take on this important work.”
Heather Cleary (Spanish and Literature), Sarah Hamill(Art History) and Eric Leveau, (French, Literature), will lead the grant to support the Sarah Lawrence Interdisciplinary Collaborative on the Environment. SLICE is a nexus between interdisciplinary perspectives and poses the humanistic question of ethical relations to one another and the planet in the face of the human-induced climate crisis. It seeks to answer that question by developing tools for interdisciplinarity and collaboration, permeable classrooms and community engagement.
The 2020-21 academic years were the start of the SLICE program’s foundations. In response to the growing interest on campus in civic engagement on climate change and social injustice, a group of faculty from art history and literature joined with colleagues in biology, economics, and environmental science in the Sarah Lawrence Interdisciplinary Collaboration on the Environment. SLICE’s faculty, many of whom are early-career, came together to rethink pedagogies in response to the entwined crises of a global pandemic, systemic racism and the violence of white supremacy, and ecological disaster. Students were able to analyze, debate, and organize around issues of environmental justice, activism, and data in courses such as art and eco, environmental literary criticism, ecology of synbiosis, and art and ecology.
Together through this funding, Sarah Lawrence and Bronx Community College will spend the three year grant period co-creating in several key areas: bringing students from both institutions together for new interdisciplinary curricula, project-based learning, and programming; building a SLICE event series and student symposium; launching an inter-institutional “Climate Justice and the Arts” exhibition, slated for Spring 2024; supporting students as they collaborate with local environmental organizations, including Sarah Lawrence’s own Center for the Urban River at Beczak (CURB), Groundwork Hudson Valley, and Untermyer Gardens; and implementing a robust digital humanities plan that will equip students with the digital literacy skills needed to reach a broad audience with their research in climate justice.
Drawing students to the humanities is at the heart of the Mellon Foundation, the nation’s largest funder of the arts, culture, and humanities. The work done by institutions supported by the Humanities for All Times initiative “will make clear the power of the humanities in solving societal challenges through distinctive analytical projects that ensure students are skilled in diagnosing the cultural conditions that hinder our achieving a fully just and equitable society, and identifying the steps necessary to changing them.”
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