Anderson+Field+Sites+Redo

Bard College—Bard is heavily focused on sustainability, with several environmental policy and other environmental-related programs. Bard is a relatively small liberal arts college, so its student culture is likely very different from the other four colleges. Cornell University—Cornell is a larger, Ivy League university offering good programs in a wide variety of majors. Even so, it is very devoted to sustainability. Like RPI, there is an environmental community that shares a house. The researcher met several students living in this “Eco House” during Power Shift New York 2012. She also visited Cornell briefly in spring 2013. Massachusetts Institute of Technology—MIT is one of RPI’s peer institutions. Both are very focused on engineering, science, math, and technology. MIT has an office of sustainability, which RPI does not have, but preliminary research on the website seems to indicate few environmental clubs. The researcher has multiple friends living in the Boston area and a visit to perform ethnography and interviews should not be too difficult. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute—RPI is the researcher’s own college. While RPI’s main focus is the STEM fields, it also has one of the oldest Science and Technology Studies programs. The dynamic between engineering and social justice can be an interesting one. The researcher is very active in student environmental, media, and governance clubs at RPI. Most of that will be used to inform her of research at other colleges, since it could potentially be unethical to study colleagues in such a manner. A case study analyzing The Green Initiative Fund (TGIF) at RPI will be part of the research, however; the researcher was a freshman during the time students attempted to pass TGIF and was only marginally involved. The researcher does have easy access to a list of students who worked on TGIF as well as contact information for many of them through her work in RPI environmental clubs. University of California at Santa Cruz—UCSC is a state college with a pretty big focus on the environment. The researcher grew up in the area and actually went to a day camp at UCSC, so she has had first-hand experience with the large UCSC farm and local area. UCSC has an office of sustainability. UCSC is different from the other colleges in that it is a state school and does not have as high caliber of academics as RPI, MIT, and Cornell. [|Green Umbrella Facebook group]  and other forums for student environmental activists to find potential interviewees. Power Shift 2011 and Power Shift 2013 were both national conferences that the researcher did ethnography at. This ethnography both informs further research and notes the type of students who come to conferences like these, as well as the material covered. Power Shift New York 2012 is where the researcher met many college students active in the environmental movement in New York. Contact information from these students will likely prove useful.
 * //Colleges for ethnography and interviews: Bard, Cornell, MIT, RPI, and UCSC // **
 * //Other sites // **