As this year’s symposium comes to an end, I am enormously proud of all the work I and so many others put in. I was really unsure of how it would work out and there was a lot of scrambling in the past couple weeks to finalize everything, but it was really rewarding to see everything finally come together. This post will look at how our group’s work with ‘Unsettling Sustainability’ turned out.
I was thoroughly impressed with the art display in Stamm. Everyone’s art look great with Elizabeth Demaray’s.I was very unsure of how our art display would turn out. The prints of LC and the world map looked great, but the day before we were scrambling to see how it would all come together. We thought we had a cork board, but that fell through, and we were unsure if we were able to get any thread to connect the pins on the map. But we found thread and the boards our map was on was perfect for the push pins. Next time I definitely want to be sure to plan out and the details better and double check everything. Overall though, it looked really good and I think showed a unique and interesting view of sustainability at Lewis and Clark.
Our practical event was also something that we were unsure of how it would turn out. I was even unsure that anyone would show up. Thankfully, some people (4 students and 3 other) came to discuss what sustainability means to them. Perhaps we spent a little too long going over our research that we would just present at our scholarly event, but it provided the necessary background to our discussion. People also were hesitant to talk at first when we were brainstorming, but eventually we were able to facilitate an interesting discussion about one way we could measure sustainability as community engagement in Portland. Below is what we came up with.
Finally, on Thursday, was our Scholarly Event. There was also a speed bump for this as our panelist, Maryanne Bylander, was unable to make it last minute. To be fair, we got her last minute as well, but it was still frustrating. However, giving the three remaining presentations extra time seemed to work really well. I messed up the introduction a little, but then Thad Miller gave a great presentation talking about his current research and unique approach to sustainability. Dan Rolfe followed with an interesting presentation on sustainability efforts at LC. He talked about how sustainability, to him, means “good things”, and he went on to talk about all the “good things” LC has done. He also commented on one of the resources we posted on our website that took a unique look at sustainability and talked about how he found it hard to believe our arguments based on this article. It felt like he was kind of petty in his attempts to discredit us. We then presented our research. The best part of the presentation though, was the discussion. We got to talk a lot about what changes could be made and look like, and a lot of the audience seems very excited and supportive.
Overall, I’d say Symposium was a huge success.