Welcome to our Spring 2022 ENVS Capstone Initiative titled, In Our Words: Narrative Power in Environmental Studies. This website consists of 12 distinct student projects situated in a research paradigm that engages storytelling, embodied experience, and local community engagement. Our initiative affirms that we each bring into our learning and classroom spaces a diversity of social and cultural backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives that shape our human-environment relationships. In seeking to identify what connects our diverse areas of research and work, our capstone class considered what it means to create space for a diversity of epistemological, pedagogical, and methodological possibilities within ENVS programs.

We centered story and thought critically about whose stories are uplifted in the environmental world both globally and at Swarthmore. Questions we asked included: Whose stories are listened to and whose are silenced? How are stories formed? What senses do they utilize and in what forms do they present themselves? How are stories told and shared? And how do we work to share more stories? Asking these questions prompted each of us to look back at our time in the ENVS program and create a way to exchange stories from our areas of interest within environmental studies.

Our website offers a glimpse at what it means to create a fluid space that is simultaneously scholarly, pragmatic, and community-oriented, and that allows for ideas and approaches to traverse disciplinary boundaries in pursuit of open-ended, collaborative, and community-based learning. The thread that weaves together our diverse projects is that they are situated in a holistic, intersectional, and community-centered research paradigm grounded in storytelling, embodied experience, and local community engagement.

Four guiding principles behind our Capstone Initiative and research included:

1. Acknowledging the validity of story and power of community storytellers in our work; whether they are family stories, community stories, or stories conveyed through creative and cultural expression. Storytellers are often voices from the ground and at the core of communities; they may be elders, youth, and children who hold unique insight, wisdom, and experience. Community storytellers are knowledge holders and experts and should be acknowledged as such.
2. Maintaining respectful, authentic, and reciprocal community relationships. Conducting research that is relevant to the needs of the community and grounded in the contexts of the community.
3. Engaging in deep listening allowing for community voices to speak directly to their social, cultural, political, and environmental contexts—past, present, and future. To respect their networks and relationships, their places and lands, and sharing of their insight and knowledge.
4. Engaging critically with issues of social and environmental justice and inequity. Using an intersectional lens critical to the current reality that we find ourselves in i.e., the COVID-19 pandemic, accelerating climate change, increasing socioeconomic disparities, racism, and gender injustice.

In conclusion, through our capstone seminar we collectively understood that we were broadening our perspectives on what environmental studies is, along with broadening our holistic understandings of the environment, and how we engage with the environment in our lives. We critically reflected on the importance of an inclusive space for a diversity of knowledges and ways of thinking, as well as for experiential ways of knowing that often sit outside of any one traditional discipline and theoretical framework. This entailed thinking about the multiple ways in which knowledge is conveyed by diverse groups of people—like through story–and about the recognition of their validity and rigor in the academy. The result of our research and community work is an exciting collection of projects bridging the theoretical and practical dimensions of learning, and truly reflecting an interdisciplinary, if not transdisciplinary, understanding of a diversity of human-environment relationships.

Thank you for visiting our website, you can find our capstone projects linked below!