Exploring Questions of Resilience and Resistance
The Humanities Center supports four faculty fellows whose research encompasses Dominican fishing communities navigating climate change, literacy programs for formerly incarcerated individuals, Black resistance movements and Indigenous environmental knowledge.
As the National Endowment for the Humanities notes, the humanities belong to everyone. They offer lenses through which to understand the implications of scientific discovery, technology, culture, history and the complex world around us. Literature, philosophy, history, rhetoric, Indigenous studies, and other areas provide us with tools to address important questions facing people and the planet, such as the impacts of climate change, strategies for strengthening community, storytelling and literacy, emancipatory research practices, and wellness and identity. These are the kinds of questions the Syracuse University Humanities Center’s Spring 2025 Faculty Fellows are taking up in their research.
“Each spring, we are so delighted to support a cohort of Faculty Fellows engaged in cutting-edge scholarship,” says Vivian M. May, director of the Humanities Center and CNY Humanities Corridor, and professor of women’s and gender studies. “This year’s Fellows ask important questions about how to engage in ethical research, how best to use storytelling to advance the needs and well-being of different communities, and how to think in new ways about the environmental humanities by engaging with a range of worldviews and experiences. Seeing how the humanities help us arrive at innovative ways to understand global conditions, and forge connections, is so important in today’s world.”
Kyrstin Mallon Andrews, Assistant Professor, Anthropology, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs
Kyrstin Mallon Andrews was selected as the Maxwell Humanities Faculty Fellow for her book project, "Crosscurrents of Risk: Navigating Changing Climates, Health and Conservation in Dominican Seascapes." Based on two years of ethnographic field research in a northwestern Dominican fishing community, Mallon Andrews examines how diver fishermen contend with both shifting ocean ecologies and restrictive conservation policies. Mallon Andrews’ book reveals how the overlapping experiences of bodily risk and environmental vulnerability illuminate a critical disconnect: those on the front lines of changing climates are often those most marginalized by prevailing conservation discourses. Mallon Andrews speaks to urgent questions about the relationship between human and environmental health, maritime studies and the persistent influence of colonial structures in Caribbean communities.
Patrick W. Berry, Associate Professor, Writing Studies, Rhetoric and Composition, College of Arts and Sciences
Patrick W. Berry was selected as this year's Syracuse Symposium Faculty Fellow for his born-digital monograph project, "Literacy and the Humanities after Prison." His research analyzes the supports available to those impacted by the criminal legal system and examines how literacy and humanities programs can help this population rebuild their lives. Building on groundwork established through Project Mend, a humanities-based program for formerly incarcerated people and their families, Berry explores how narrative and community can help participants reimagine their identities. Project Mend’s semester-long workshops provide participants with editorial experience and community dialogue, culminating in their work on Mend, a national anthology featuring writing by justice-impacted individuals.
Alicia K. Hatcher, Assistant Professor, Writing Studies, Rhetoric and Composition, College of Arts and Sciences
Alicia K. Hatcher was selected as a Humanities Faculty Fellow for her book project, "Articulating and Interrogating Black Embodied Resistance: Using Performative Symbolic Resistance as a Tactical, Analytical Tool." Her monograph introduces the concept of Performative Symbolic Resistance (PSR) as a framework to analyze individual acts performed by activists in their efforts to combat social injustices. Hatcher defines PSR as the use of specific motions or acts to symbolize protest socially constructed systems of oppression. Her work situates PSR as both a descriptive term and an analytical tool that scholars, practitioners and students can use to examine how performance, performativity and symbolism function in resistance movements, with particular attention to Black embodied resistance practices.
Chie Sakakibara, Associate Professor, Native American and Indigenous Studies and Geography and the Environment, College of Arts and Sciences | Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs
Chie Sakakibara was selected as a Humanities Faculty Fellow for her project, "Exploration of the Indigenous Environmental Humanities: Community Resilience, Sovereignty and Climate Change on Turtle Island." Sakakibara serves as a volume editor of a collaborative manuscript resulting from the 2023 Ray Smith Symposium on "Indigenous Resilience, Climate Change and the Environmental Humanities." This anthology brings together voices of Indigenous environmentalists, artists and activists from Central New York, Alaska, Oklahoma and California in conversation with students, faculty and community members from Syracuse University and beyond. Grounded in the environmental humanities, the project aims to facilitate research sovereignty and knowledge emancipation pursued by Indigenous community members themselves.