MA in Individualized StudiesFaculty Specializations in Environmental StudiesThe low residency MA in Individualized Studies faculty bring the benefit of rich and varied backgrounds and interests to the self-designed work of their students. In addition, they bring specialized knowledge to the work of the program’s three concentrations. Below are some of the experiences that shape their knowledge in Environmental Studies:
A Briton, Karen lived in Japan for 28 years, among people who suffered some of the worst industrial (environmental) disasters, and who are now self-consciously respectful of nature, collectively serious about the responsible disposal of garbage, and urgently researching possibilities of healthy recycling. Karen has focused on colonial and postcolonial cultural studies, the underdevelopment of colonies, how nation/race, gender, and economics intersect in the displacement and impoverishment of people by post-WWII development (aid) policies, and how grassroots sustainability movements creatively resist the more destructive forces of globalization.
Francis has a background in the history of religions and Jungian psychology with interests in philosophy, social science and neuroscience. In the context of environmental studies, he can be a resource in the broad area of religion and ecology. Francis is the coordinator of the Consciousness Studies Concentration.
Ellie grew up on a farm in northern Alberta, was garden designer and community garden activist in Vancouver through the 1990s, and is still making gardens, now in California. A strong motive for her work in cognitive science has been to build a defense of mind that is at the same time a defense of land. Mind has evolved through eons of contact with the natural world, and present forms of human cognition continue to rely on that long history of success in perception and action. If we destroy the natural world, we destroy the conditions of our own intelligence.
Tomás was born in Mexico and grew up in Australia. In addition to teaching at Goddard, he currently teaches research design, systems thinking, and mathematical modeling at Sterling College. He has a strong background in qualitative research methodologies and has advised students at Goddard interested in disciplines from the social sciences: anthropology, sociology, economics, and political theory.
Ralph is the coordinator of the Environmental Studies Concentration. Ralph is an interdisciplinarian whose work cuts across and beyond a number of fields to understand our relationships with our environments. His work as an environmental historian draws from popular culture (including film studies), literature & eco-criticism, animals & society, natural history & ecology, and Appalachian studies. His other interests include place studies, place-based and non-formal education, gender and the environment, nature-based spirituality, and nonprofit management. Ralph is author of The Nature Fakers: Wildlife, Science & Sentiment (University Press of Virginia) and editor of The Wild Animal Story (Temple University Press). His papers have been published in a number of scholarly journals, including Environmental History, Environmental Review, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Forest & Conservation History, and Journal of Environmental Education. Ralph taught a series of graduate level field-based short-courses on natural history for University of Virginia, taught history at Virginia Tech, and natural science and environmental studies at Hampshire College. His earlier career included 20 years in museum and nature center management and program development, during which he led the development of place-based exhibits and educational programs on local and state-wide levels. He has been an advocate for open space and endangered species protection, a registered lobbyist, and member of a town Conservation Commission in Massachusetts; member of a Soil & Water Conservation District board in Virginia; and a consultant to environmental NGOs in El Salvador. Ralph was co-founder and first president of the New England Environmental Education Alliance, served as presidents of the American Nature Study Society and the national Alliance for Environmental Education, and was a board member of the Global Network of Environmental Education Centers and Deputy Director of its Mid-Atlantic Region. He is presently a founding member of the board directors of Blue Ridge Heritage, which is developing a place-based education center and tourist destination in collaboration with the Blue Ridge Parkway. He lives at the headwaters of the Dan River on the Blue Ridge of southwestern Virginia.
Caryn's environmental specialities are bioregionalism in general, and sustainable group process, ecofeminism, ecopoetics, and ecospirituality in specific. For over two decades, she has been deeply involved in the bioregional movement on the continental and local levels: She helped found the Continental Bioregional Congress (helped organize the first one in 1984 and served as the main coordinator for the congress in 2002), the Prairie Biome Congress, and the Kansas Area Watershed Council, one of the oldest, continuous bioregional groups in the country. She has also served on the Coordinating Council of the Continental Bioregional Congress since 2002, on which she specializes in mentoring bioregional organizers. Her essays, articles and poems on sense of place and sustainability were published in Home: A Bioregional Reader, Planet Drum Pulse, Konza (which she served as editor of for 15 years), and literary journals. She is on the steering committee of the Kansas Conference for Imagination and Place, which has organized two national conferences. She also facilitated bioregional consensus training for local ecological groups. She was involved in the food cooperative movement, and helped found an educational not-for-profit organization, the Community Mercantile Educational Foundation, on sustainable agriculture and nutrition, which she presided over for several years. Finally, she often facilitates writing workshops on ecological awareness and awakening. She lives on native prairie near Lawrence, KS. which she and her husband are restoring. Caryn is the coordinator of the Transformative Language Arts Concentration.
James works in the community as both a clinical and school psychologist, and can often be found covered in dirt on the weekends practicing organic gardening methods either at his home in NH or cabin in northern Vermont. Given his interests in narrative and poetry, he has worked with students on projects related to language and place, and the experience of self and community in relation to the environment. He is a member of the American Psychological Association’s division on Population and the Environment. He has a strong interest in current and historical personal environmental narratives (“nature writing”) and in the psychology of sustaining hope, particularly as it applies to thinking about environmental concerns.
Lise grew up in one big city and presently lives in another one (though she retreats to a cabin up north in the summer). Yet forging an intimate relationship with the earth and her creatures seems to her as vital a mission as any at this time, for herself, and for our species as a whole. Her feminism is deeply bound up with her love of nature and her rage at the way other species and the earth itself tend to be viewed and treated in patriarchal societies. The most exciting work her students have done over the past five years takes place on the edge between the human and non-human world: in the realm of theory, expanding the notion of intersubjectivity to include nonhuman subjects, and in the realm of narrative prose (fiction, memoir, creative nonfiction), exploring connections to particular places, creatures, heavenly bodies--and finding new language and forms in which to express those connections.
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Francis X. Charet
Ellie Epp
Tomás Kalmar
James Sparrell
Lise Weil