True to its commitment to innovative interdisciplinary scholarship, The New School for Social Research recently launched the Integrative PhD Fellowship, a program that crosses boundaries between disciplines and trains students to incorporate new analytic and expository techniques, like data visualization and graphic design, into their work.
Supported by a $750,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and led by University in Exile Professor of Sociology Robin Wagner-Pacifici and associate professor of art, media, and technology Daniel Sauter, the program teaches doctoral students to use emerging qualitative and quantitative methods in their analysis of some of the most pressing questions of our time. The program also invites faculty across the university to identify existing courses offered at The New School that can help PhD students develop new fields of integrative research and supports the creation of classes that are co-taught by faculty from across the university's colleges.
Katinka Wijsman, a Politics doctoral candidate working on environmental issues, is one of the first four Integrative PhD fellows, having joined the program in part to learn more about visualizing landscape histories. Wijsman's research, which she conducts in New York City's Jamaica Bay, Suriname's Weg naar Zee district, and the Netherlands' Kijkduin, focuses on how coastal communities use nature-based or green infrastructure as a means of adapting to climate change. In Wijsman's words, such nature-based approaches "conceive of 'nature' as a climate change ally" rather than as "something in need of domination."
Wijsman considers communities in a broad sense, thinking of them as not only human phenomena but rather entities that include other species and involve complex biophysical processes. Her participant observation in coastal communities entails what she calls "multispecies ethnographic encounters," which she combines with document analysis and interviews to convey the politics of the changing landscape. In the Integrative PhD Fellowship program, she has acquired visual communication methods with which she makes her research accessible to new audiences.
In keeping with the intent of the program, Wijsman brings together analytic frameworks and methods from multiple disciplines into her work. She aims to understand better the effects of combining nature-based responses to climate change with traditional approaches. In her words, she investigates "the design, implementation, and evaluation of these nature-based solutions for climate change adaptation, and the politics of responsibility they emerge from and give rise to."
Wijsman also works with a National Science Foundation-funded research network called Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network (URExSRN). At UREx SRN, university and government researchers and practitioners focus on climate change in ten cities in the United States and Latin America. Wijsman and her colleagues work on the ground, exploring natural environments, building new data resources, and presenting this information to the public and to government officials.
For Wijsman, the Integrative PhD Fellowship program is an ideal opportunity to discover new ways to conduct research and exchange ideas with academics and policymakers across fields. "I am excited about the intellectual mission and plan of action of the Integrative PhD," she says. "This sort of exchange could be transformative to one's own thinking and push intellectual creativity."
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