Dear Colleagues, Students, and Friends,
What a joy to be back on Penn’s campus! As I told my undergraduate students in our first class meeting this week, “this is going to be fun!” In the last few weeks, I’ve been meeting with minors in the program, talking with research partners far and near, and working with the first cohort of “Climate Champions”--nine Philadelphia public high school teachers who teach in eight schools across the District. Amidst another summer of extreme weather events, our work together feels only more urgent.
This year and this term, PPEH has an extraordinary line-up of public events in store for you: workshops, readings, and a museum exhibit. Featured among them is the four-part series on the “Anthropos-Not-Seen,” initiated, designed and facilitated by this year’s Topic Director, Dr. Kristina Lyons. All these events are free and open to the public. We’re so glad we’ll be able to meet in person and will also be working to make remote participation possible whenever feasible. I can’t wait to see you!
In a first for PPEH this year, we’re hosting a number of formally Affiliated Researchers and Community Partners. They will be contributing actively to our Working Wednesdays brown bag lunch sessions and deepening and extending our ongoing conversations at the intersection of the theory and practice of arts-informed community based participatory research. In another first, we’re delighted to be home this year to our first Public Pedagogy Fellow, Jane Robbins Mize. Stay tuned for her fall workshop at the nexus of prisons and pollution, offered in conjunction with Affiliated Researcher Dr. Isabel Lane and part of the Futures Beyond Refining project.
We’re thrilled to welcome Post-Doctoral Fellow Dr. Rachel Cypher who recently welcomed a new baby to the family! We will again be hosting a cohort of five Graduate Fellows and undergraduate public research interns. We will be working with our partners in the International Doctoral Training Cluster at the University of Toronto and Oxford University and hosting some shared events.
It’s going to be a really fun year. Please stay tuned for more upcoming events–and be in touch. I hope to see you around campus or online soon, and in the meantime, I’m wishing you the very best in these often very difficult times.
Sincerely,
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