Burlington Standard

The University of Vermont issued the following announcement.

For over 75 years, the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program has supported thousands of professors, scholars, and artists from many backgrounds to research and teach overseas. Led by the U.S. Department of State and the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board, these competitive and highly prestigious awards have launched new research efforts, provided cross-cultural understanding, and served as a rich source of informal diplomacy and friendship.

Fulbright alumni include 61 Nobel Prize laureates, 89 Pulitzer Prize recipients, and 40 who have served as a head of state or government.

For the 2022-23 cycle of Fulbright Scholar competition, six members of the faculty at the University of Vermont won awards, a remarkable (and perhaps unprecedented) level of success for UVM.

We decided to drop in on each of these distinguished researchers and teachers, to learn a bit more about their Fulbright plans and how their time abroad will contribute to the creation of useful knowledge—and a better, more beautiful and safer world.

Jeanne Shea

On the struggles and triumphs of aging

Jeanne Shea thinks Taiwan may have some things to teach Vermont about caring for old people—and vice versa.

In 2020, Shea, a researcher and professor in UVM’s Department of Anthropology, wrote a book with some colleagues on aging and caregiving in East Asia. “I found that Taiwan is quite outstanding in the kinds of supports and services offered for the elderly,” she says, including universal healthcare, pensions, and long-term insurance. “And it also covers hospice at home, through its national health insurance—unlike Japan or South Korea that only cover hospice care in a hospital.”

To get a deeper understanding of Taiwan’s  social policies in support of the elderly and their caregivers, Shea will be traveling as a U.S. Fulbright Scholar to the Institute of Gerontology at the National Cheng Kung University (NCKU) in Tainan, Taiwan, this summer, conducting research with colleagues there into the beginning of 2023.

“You can read about policy in books and papers—but that only goes so far,’’ says Shea. “I want talk to social workers and other people involved in helping, especially the low-income elderly and their family caregivers, to understand how they navigate the supports that are available.”

Both Taiwan and Vermont have rapidly aging populations. “I'm curious whether there's anything that Vermont could learn from Taiwan; both places are small and both may have parts of their care systems that are scalable,” says Shea, who directs UVM’s Health and Society Program. “Vermont is often seen as a laboratory for other places too,” including its innovative SASH program, which provides supports and services for older adults living at home. So Shea would like to see what kinds of insights and conversations she can develop, sharing information “that could improve policy,” she says, for supporting and caring for the elderly in both places.

Shea’s goal is to understand the perspective of ordinary people as they navigate benefits for older adults in their healthcare and social welfare system—in different cultures. This is her third experience as a Fulbright scholar, with previous trips to Beijing in 1989-90 and Shanghai in 2012. “We’re primed to look for differences,” Shea says, “that’s what anthropologists do. A policy analyst may focus really deeply on one policy, but they’re not as likely to think about the holistic experience of a person navigating their life across a range of policies and services.”

Jeanne Shea says, “Fulbright is a wonderful program because it's a people-to-people diplomacy program, too. The struggles and triumphs of aging people—that's something that people all over the world experience. So can we set aside some political differences and think about what we can learn from each other?”

Jeff Frolik

Toward a simple sensing system

Imagine a sensing system so small, simple, cheap, and biodegradable that you could make thousands of them and scatter them across the landscape. That’s not too far off from the kind of device that Jeff Frolik and some colleagues are working on. “It’s called a harmonic transponder,” says Frolik, a professor of electrical engineering in UVM’s College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences. “It’s a really simplistic wireless device, kind of like an RFID tag.” His partners in Oregon and the Czech Republic have built versions of these devices, and Frolik’s task is to “come up with good ways to interrogate the devices,” he says, “to extract information from the environment that they are embedded in.”

One primary use they imagine is measuring soil moisture. “If you bury this device in dry soil, the signal being received will be relatively strong,” Frolik says, “if the soil gets wet, then the signal gets attenuated and so you're going to get a weaker return.”

In the spring of 2017, Jeff Frolik held the Fulbright Distinguished Chair position at the Czech Technical University in Prague. “It was great, but I felt like I had unfinished business, so I reapplied for a second Fulbright at the same location.” Frolik will be returning to Prague this fall. His unfinished business there will focus on advancing his research on harmonic transponders (plus teaching a technical writing course to graduate students) in collaboration with his Czech and U.S. partners.

“We’ll be interrogating these transponders at different powers and frequencies—and measuring the response,” Frolik says. One of the remarkable aspects of the devices is that they produce a harmonic signal in return that’s twice the frequency of the interrogation signal. “If you send a signal at one gigahertz, you’ll get a two gigahertz signal back,” Frolik explains. This non-linear effect creates a clearer return signal—an advantage over the RFID tags used in retail stores and the like since it allows the scientists to detect the transponders with lower power and from a greater distance.

Harmonic transponders are used now in a few applications including as sewn-in devices for mountaineers to help locate them under snow in case they are hit by an avalanche. “But we think our approach will let us interrogate these devices with a drone from farther off,” Frolik says, “agriculture is an obvious application, but there may be interest in deploying them on slopes to know better when a landslide might happen.”

Jason Garvey

Autobiography of a quantitative queer

Jason Garvey points to a Mylar rainbow unicorn attached to the wall behind his desk. “I use Teams and Zoom a lot, which is why I have this unicorn,” he says. “Every time I hop on a conference call, I want everyone to know I’m queer.”

Garvey began his career as a student affairs professional before joining the faculty at the University of Vermont in 2016. He’s now the Friedman-Hipps Green and Gold Professor of Education and works primarily with UVM’s Higher Education and Student Affairs Administration program.

He describes himself as a quantitative queer. “All of my research uses large-scale surveys and I’m very much a quantitative methodologist,” he says. “My scholarship centers on the lived experiences of queer and trans collegians.” But in recent years his work has been exploring some of the problems and limits of statistics-focused research, “recognizing the white supremacist origin of statistics and how queer and trans communities are virtually erased in large-scale quantitative examinations,” he says. An article he wrote in 2017, called “Uncovering the Queerness of My Classroom Emotions,” presented stories from his experience in higher education—and got a very positive reception.

This move toward more personal narrative, Garvey says, is at the heart of his Fulbright project that will take him to the Eccles Center for American Studies at the British Library in London from January to June of 2023.

“My project is called College Fag: the Autobiography of a Queer Academic,” Garvey says. “I will be examining my journey from 2002, when I started as an undergraduate student, to 2022”—while digging into the extensive archives at the library about the multi-layered experience of queerness in America. He plans to frame his project around stories from his experience—including being assaulted and punched in the throat in Washington, DC, while enrolled as a graduate student at the University of Maryland. A few weeks later, after the suicide death of Tyler Clementi, “I had newspapers calling me—as the queer and trans resource professional—asking what I was doing to support mental health for queer and trans people. And I literally didn't have a voice because I was just attacked.”

“I want to take a leap into the unknown and really focus more on that autobiographical queerness, because…” he says, and then pauses for a long time. “I don't know, as a queer person being in the academy can feel a little isolating—especially with recent legislation.” He aims to have his project develop into a book, “weaving together large-scale empirical studies with policy analyses—all grounded in some very personal vignettes that have shaped who I am.”

“I've been desiring more purpose in my life, to contribute to social change,” Jay Garvey says. “And if this is the lever that taps into people's hearts, and with solidarity, then it's something worth exploring.”

Rachelle Gould

The intangible values of nature

Since the 1980’s, governments and policymakers have been giving increased attention to “ecosystem services.” This is a technical term for the complex truth that clean air, drinkable water, crop pollination, climate regulation—and many other necessities of human life provided by nature—underpin the economy and should be formally accounted for in decision-making and in policy.

But much of what people, in cultures around the planet, value about nature—or about the more-than-human world—is not material, is not part of a conventional economic vocabulary. “There are many non-material ways that nature benefits people,” says UVM scholar Rachelle Gould. “These include spirituality, psychological benefit, cultural identity, heritage. These complex aspects of human-nature relationships are also essential to human well-being.”

Gould, a professor in UVM’s Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, and Fellow in the Gund Institute for Environment, wants to know how these kinds of values can be brought more strongly into public conversations, political deliberations, and, importantly, into the work of policymaking.

“We know these cultural ecosystem services are important to people,” she says, “so how do we get a broader array of these values into our governmental processes? How can we represent, in decisionmaking, how and why nature is important to people?”

To explore these questions more deeply, seeking practical tools, Gould has received a special Fulbright Scholar designation called the Fulbright-Carlos Rico Award for North American Studies. She’ll travel to both Canada and Mexico over nine months, starting in the fall. There, Gould will spend time with collaborators in both countries looking for quantitative and qualitative methods for understanding people’s own grasp of their intangible connections to nature.

“We don’t know exactly what these tools are yet,” she says. “These kinds of cultural ecosystem services measurement techniques—that are policy-relevant and easy to use—are rare and need vetting and refinement.” For example, the Canadian government has invested $20 million (CA) in a Census of Environment that will monitor ecosystem services across the country. “But this program has almost no provisions for measuring cultural ecosystem services,” Gould notes.

Some of the avenues that Gould—and her Fulbright collaborators at McGill University, the University of British Columbia, and the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México—may explore include looking at large-scale responses on social media, studying communications of religious organizations, or interviews conducted in novel ways. In Vermont, she’s been developing (with PhD candidate Josh Morse) a “social citizen science” project that has high school students going out into their communities to interview people about coyotes, collecting stories about their experiences and relationship with these controversial animals. “Then we’re analyzing those stories for the values expressed,” Gould says. “It’s very time-intensive, but we may be able to scale it up.”

“During this Fulbright, we’re working to create something feasible, that can inform policy,” Rachelle Gould says. “Is there a way to have a deliberative public conversation about these kinds of values—hard-to-express values that matter deeply to people—so that we can move beyond technocratic approaches that must convert all that is meaningful into numbers?”

Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst

Toward doing better, not just knowing better

Religions aren’t races, notes scholar Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst, “but religions are racialized,” she says. For example, she says, “we know that Muslims come from all over the world,” with people of many different backgrounds, appearances, and beliefs identifying as Islamic. “So how do we, in the U.S.  and Europe, think of Islam as a monolithic thing where all Muslims subscribe to one ideology?”

“A guy named Mohammed Ahmed is going to be treated differently at the airport even if he’s saying ‘I’m an atheist,’ right?” says Morgenstein Fuerst.

It’s about a racialized religious identity, “where all we need to know about you is how you look, how you sound, what we assume your family to be,” she says. “And we see similar patterns around anti-Jewish profiling. It’s not about belief. It’s this idea that you can’t escape your last name.”

As a professor of religion at UVM, a Jewish woman, a parent, and a person who wants to make the world more peaceful, Morgenstein Fuerst thinks deeply about hate and ways it might be rooted out.

“I’ve been exploring the shared global history of hate of these religious groups that sometimes are racialized,” she says. “And when they're racialized, we see this flip into discrimination and oppression.” With her Fulbright Scholar award, she’ll continue this research effort, traveling to the U.K. for the first half of 2023 to work at the Edward Cadbury Centre for the Public Understanding of Religion, at the University of Birmingham.

“How do we connect things like the Uighurs and ethnic Muslim groups in China who are being ethnically cleansed—some experts are calling it genocide—to American policies like the Muslim ban or Guantanamo Bay or the way we screen for terrorism at the airport?” she asks.

Yes, these specific histories need to be understood on their own terms, she says. “And yet we see the same kind of rhetoric the world over.”  Morgenstein Fuerst’s first book was about how British imperialism in India set the stage for anti-Muslim hostility. “And we see it moving around the world. And now we're seeing a spike in Islamophobia and antisemitism globally.”

Morgenstein Fuerst’s work at the Cadbury Centre will include conversations with both scholars and other residents of Birmingham who are of Indian and South Asian origin. “I want to talk with them about their relationship to the state and how they identify themselves,” she says. And she’s excited to be part of the Centre’s active engagement with efforts in Birmingham and beyond to improve public understanding of the roots of hatred—and build policies to fight it.

“Let’s put scholarship toward doing better, not just knowing better,” says Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst. “I'm not studying hate because I think it's interesting. I want it to go away.”

Deborah Blom

Listening at Tiwanaku

In a valley between two sacred mountains sits Tiwanaku, the best-known archeological site in Bolivia and a place of great spiritual and cultural significance to the Aymara and other Andean peoples. A complex history of colonization, looting, and archeological research at Tiwanaku stretches back centuries. In recent decades, anthropologists, archeologists, and members of the communities surrounding the site have pondered how to come to terms with this legacy.

UVM archeologist and professor of anthropology Deborah Blom active researcher at Tiwanaku, undertaking laboratory work and excavations in collaboration with Bolivian scholars, leaders, and other local stakeholders over the past 25 years. Through a Fulbright US Scholars award, Blom will return to Tiwanaku three times over the next three years, starting with a trip this fall.

Through a Fulbright US Scholars award, Blom will return to Tiwanaku three times over the next three years, starting with a trip this fall.

An expert in biological anthropology, Blom says, “archeology for me is not just about digging in the dirt. It's about working together with a multitude of individuals, with diverse perspectives, to learn about the past together.” Recognizing the complexity, pain, and ambiguity of many anthropological questions is not a barrier to insight for her—but rather is the necessary starting point for authentic and mutual discoveries.

Blom doesn’t yet know precisely what her activity at the UNESCO World Heritage Site will be, nor even what questions will shape her eventual work. “The most important work now is to listen,” she says. “Archeologists must take the time needed to connect with local and descendent communities,” she says—to build reciprocal research projects that are driven by the knowledge and needs of, in this case, the 12,000 people, of largely Aymara descent, who live and work around Tiwanaku.

It may be that efforts to expand tourism infrastructure and museum exhibitions will rise to the top of the priorities for these communities. Many people who live around the site, “identify as descendants of the ancient Tiwanaku culture and are interested in learning about new archeological research as part of their heritage,” Blom notes. “Additionally, many of my Bolivian colleagues have begun some fascinating new projects at the site." Having been unable to travel to Bolivia over the past several years of the pandemic, she is looking forward to rebuilding relationships and connections to the community there. “Scholars working in Bolivia, and in particular, Tiwanaku,” Blom says, “must approach their work with the patience, humility, and generosity that this complex and rich historical and sociopolitical landscape deserves.”

Original source can be found here.