A Month in the Museum: “Landscape Across the Disciplines”
A Doctoral Student Summer Institute Bridging Science and Humanities
June 2018
This (non-credit) summer institute offers doctoral students from a wide range of disciplines across the natural sciences, social sciences, humanities, and arts the opportunity to engage in the theory and practice of integrative, interdisciplinary public scholarship. The MSU Museum, the Botanical Garden, and the associated campus Arboretum are eager to engage in dialogue with doctoral students, who will have the opportunity to help these institutions reimagine interpretive frameworks for installations, exhibits, and public programs. Our object of study during 2018 is “landscape" as a biological and cultural phenomenon, understood from a range of disciplinary perspectives. How are landscapes produced, transformed, and struggled over through the intersection of biological processes and human projects, both intentional and unintentional? The institute is a partnership of the MSU Graduate School, The MSU Museum, and the W.J. Beal Botanical Garden.
The institute will provide doctoral students opportunities to work in cross-disciplinary teams, to reflect on their own disciplinary assumptions, to communicate their knowledge across fields and to various publics, and to approach important problems in science and society from different perspectives. Participants will engage in broader conversations and learn to bring these conversations back into their disciplinary base. The group will meet for 3 hours each Monday in June to reconsider critically a landscape site, including the Beal Botanical Garden, the campus arboretum, the Kellogg Biological Station, and the MSU Museum’s large-scale dioramas of simulated biomes. Teams will produce final products that will become part of the public life of the sites with which they interact. Each student will receive a $500 fellowship to help support the project. The institute co-conveners are: Mark Auslander (Director, MSU Museum) and Judith Stoddart, (Associate Dean of the Graduate School), with Beronda Montgomery (Foundation Professor Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology), and Frank Telewski (Professor of Plant Biology and curator of the W.J. Beal Botanical Garden and Campus Arboretum).
Applications are due April 2, 2018. Details of the application process can be found on this PDF. Questions can be directed to Mark Auslander (ausland5@msu.edu) or Judith Stoddart (stoddart@msu.edu).
