Four liberal arts students receive sustainability research awards

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Alison Axtman, Dani Buffa, Rachel Palkovitz, and Casey Tilley each recently received the 2023 Liberal Arts Student Award for Research on Sustainability (LASARS).

The College of the Liberal Arts’ Sustainability Council presents the award annually to Liberal Arts students whose research or creative project, including work in a lab, field, or archives, focuses on sustainability. The 2023 winners will be recognized and invited to present posters at the spring 2024 Undergraduate or Graduate Exhibitions.

Alison Axtman

Axtman, who graduated this spring with bachelor’s degrees in French and global and international studies, was honored for her project titled “Pennsylvania Residents’ Perceptions and Support for Climate Change Policies.” With the help of her faculty sponsor, Penn State Professor of Psychology Janet Swim, Axtman prepared and distributed a survey to Pennsylvania residents.

The Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania native’s research examined Pennsylvanians’ perception of three different climate policies — carbon action tax cuts, caps and reductions on carbon dioxide emissions from the power sector, and renewable resource-generated electricity standards for utility companies — in terms of policy support and anticipated environmental, social, individual economics, and business economic impacts. 

“I anticipated Democrats [favoring] the policies more than Republicans, but I [wanted to] explore preferences among the policies,” Axtman said. “I hypothesized that perceiving favorable environmental, economic and social impacts would correlate positively with policy support.”

Axtman’s research inspiration came from Yoram Bauman, an American economist who visited Penn State and performed his climate change comedy show last October. Bauman’s humorous approach to demonstrate intersections between climate change, economics and public policy caught her attention and ultimately led her down the path of researching the carbon tax cuts.

Axtman’s research findings indicated that respondents who identified politically as Democrats or independents liked all the policies equally, while those who identified as Republicans preferred the carbon tax cut policy over the others. “Anticipated impacts are associated with support, and all participants anticipated more positive individual economic impacts for the carbon tax cut policy,” she said.

Dani Buffa

Dani Buffa, a doctoral candidate pursuing degrees in anthropology and climate science, received a LASARS for her project titled “A Multi-Proxy Approach to Exploring Oyster Harvesting Methods in Southwestern Madagascar.” This project supports her doctoral dissertation research on “Women Shellfishers’ Insights into Ecosocial System Resilience in Southwestern Madagascar 1000 BP to Present.” In archaeology, “BP” stands for “before present,” or the year 1950, referring to the origins of modern radiocarbon dating.

Buffa, a Somerset, New Jersey native, studies Southwestern Madagascar rock oysters (Saccostrea cucullate) — oysters ubiquitous in intertidal lagoons which historically offered an easily accessible and sustainable food source for the Vezo people and residents of other coastal communities, who have now ceased the practice of harvesting oysters, said Buffa.

“Oysters have faded precipitously from the archaeological record after 400-300 BP, and ethnographic interviews with local Vezo fisherfolk individuate that locals no longer eat oysters — though community leaders expressed interest in reintegrating oysters into the diet should what had caused an illness in the 18th and 19th centuries be better understood,” Buffa said. “In this project, I will use a multi-proxy approach to study archaeological and modern shellfish to investigate the potential contributing factors to the ethnographically indicated oyster-borne illness.”

Buffa’s research will query rock-oyster population demographic shifts over time and use ethnographic interviews and ethnoarchaeological investigations of shell middens — fossilized heaps of discarded shells — to describe changes in foraging behavior over time. Additionally, using indicator species and existing palaeoecological archives, the research will reconstruct regional and local paleoenvironmental conditions over the last thousand years, according to Buffa.

“Ultimately, I will explore the benefits of multi-proxy approaches to understand shifting resource management practices as related to local environmental conditions to holistically address past socio-ecological relationships," Buffa said.

Buffa is conducting her research under the mentorship of Isabelle Holland-Lulewicz, Penn State assistant professor of anthropology, and Kristina Douglass, associate professor of climate at Columbia University.  

“The LASARS grant is funding critical data analysis on the last project that will allow me to finish my dissertation,” Buffa said. “I’m very much in the thick of data analysis … and I hope to accomplish a statistically significant result.”

Rachel Palkovitz

Rachel Palkovitz, a fourth-year anthropology doctoral candidate, received a LASARS for her project titled “How ‘Wild’ is American Wild Ginseng? Investigating the Role of Human Cultivation in Shaping Morphological and Genetic Diversity of a Valuable Non-Timber Forest Resource.” The Woodbridge, Virginia native is investigating the human influence on the ecology and evolution of American ginseng, a conservation-priority understory herb with high cultural and economic value for its medicinal properties.

“American ginseng is in decline in the wild because of overharvesting for commercial trade, but it is being grown commercially in Wisconsin and Canada as well as in small-scale forests farms in the Appalachian region,” Palkovitz said. “I will interview industry experts and ginseng foragers regarding traits they find desirable; compare the morphology, or form and structure, of wild and cultivated ginseng leaf material using pre-established markers; and pair them with genetic markers developed by collaborators at the U.S. Geological Survey to assess whether cultivation practices are shaping ginseng diversity across the United States.”

Her research aims to highlight how American ginseng is critical to environmental, social and economic dimensions of sustainability due to its large entwinement with forest biodiversity and its use as a nontimber forest product which people rely on for nutrition, medicine and livelihoods around the world. The project will also help identify priority lineages for germplasm, or genetic, conservation of American ginseng.

Palkovitz will be mentored during her research by Penn State Associate Teaching Professor of Ecosystem Science and Management Eric Burkhart and other members of her research committee.

“Thanks to Dr. Burkhart and the whole team of ginseng researchers we work with, I am at the stage [in my research] where I have a lot of preliminary genetic and morphological data that I need to analyze,” Palkovitz said. “The key informant interviews with growers are in early stages. Over the next two years, I will be interviewing ginseng growers, analyzing the quantitative data, and working closely with mentors, collaborators, and people in the ginseng community to interpret and present results.”

Palkovitz’s research is also supported by the Department of Anthropology’s Hill Fellowship and by a Wild Resource Conservation grant from the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources. Palkovitz and her committee are also collaborating with researchers from the U.S. Geological Survey who are studying ginseng population genetics across North America.

“My overall hope is to contribute research findings to conservation efforts integrating scientists, growers, and native plant enthusiasts.”

Casey Tilley

Casey Tilley, a fourth-year doctoral degree candidate in Asian studies and comparative literature, received a LASARS for their research titled “Grassroots Ecopoetics in Brazil: Contemporary Cordel on the Life and Death of the Amazon.” The Billerica, Massachusetts, native will investigate archives of environmental discourse for the conservation of the Amazon rainforest from the Library of Congress collections of Brazilian Cordel.

Tilley's research focus is on ecopoetics, including poetic treatments of climate change, development (counter)discourses, and regional grassroots and experimental literatures in mainland China, Taiwan and Brazil. Tilley is working on the project with the support of their faculty sponsor, Sarah Townsend, associate professor of Spanish and Portuguese.

Cordels, which are pamphlets like chapbooks or zines, are emblematic of Northeast Brazil’s national heritage aesthetic and are important sites of public discourse, according to Tilley.

“In Brazil, whether the Amazon should be conserved as wilderness, opened for extractive industries, or sovereignty returned to Indigenous peoples, isn’t an either-or question but a delicate political one,” Tilley said. “This project hopes to understand the way these ideas are framed and debated, rhetorically and artistically, at [the] local level.”

Tilley’s research sheds light on the extensive history of mutual entanglement between Brazil’s inhabitants and the Amazon: During the boom of the Brazilian rubber industry, many of the workers that moved or were conscripted into the industry came from the arid Brazil Northeast — a pattern that has repeated during rushes for wealth, said Tilley.

“In times and places where literacy was not a given, cordels would be performed aloud at markets,” Tilley said. “The combination of written-aural-visual media was both a way to inform one’s peers of national and world news but also a venue where people otherwise distant from political power could comment, debate and represent their own agendas.

“I’m interested in how the familiar ‘sides’ of environmental debates are represented [in cordels]. After reading work by poets based in Amazonia and cordels on conversation of fragile ecosystems in the Northeast, it was intuitive to wonder how cordellistas would approach the most internationally known environmental topic in Brazil.”

The LASARS has allowed Tilley to travel to the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. to review Brazilian cordels within the American Folklife Center. Working with the center’s librarians, Tilley has familiarized themself with more than 10,000 archived cordels this summer and organized which cordels they will follow through with leads.

“[Using] the past few decades of this centuries-old poetic form, I hope to show the state of environmental — including sustainability and development — discourses in Brazil as they have taken shape at the grassroots level, including that by and for people outside the Amazon.”

Applications for Liberal Arts Student Awards for Research on Sustainability

Applications for the next round of Liberal Arts Student Awards for Research on Sustainability open on Aug. 1 and will be accepted through Oct. 15. More information, including the link to apply, can be found on the Liberal Arts Sustainability Council’s website.

‘Moments of Change: Creating a Livable Planet’

Sustainability is the theme of the current offering in the College of the Liberal Arts’ “Moments of Change” initiative — an undertaking that brings students, faculty, staff, and alumni together to explore what it means to live through historic and contemporary times of change. Throughout the 2023-24 academic year, “Moments of Change: Creating a Livable Planet” will examine the many aspects of sustainability and highlight the ongoing work of the Liberal Arts Sustainability Council and students, faculty and staff in that regard.