Talk: Expanding the spaces and places for geoscience through equitable exchange with communities
Presented by Dr. Lora Harris
Tuesday, November 12, 2024 · 4 - 5 PM
Join us for our Talk Tuesday on November 12, 2024 at 4p.
Guest Speaker
Lora Harris (she/her) is a professor and associate
director of research at the Chesapeake Biological Laboratory within the
University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science
Talk Title
Expanding the spaces and places for geoscience through equitable exchange with communities
Abstract
The
Active Societal Participation In Research and Education (ASPIRE)
program seeks to expand the places and people involved in meeting
challenging environmental and climate change issues through supporting
and encouraging geoscience research co-managed by scientists and
community members. The vision of ASPIRE is that supporting place-based,
community-based work will simultaneously attract, recruit, and retain a
wider diversity of early career scientists in Geoscience, as well as
strengthen public trust in Geoscience to address the local-to-global
environmental issues threatening our world. ASPIRE recognizes that the
urgency of these issues means work to develop geoscientist leaders must
be accompanied by meaningful and equitable exchange with under-resourced
and minority communities that have often been left out of environmental
research and solutions. There
is a documented tendency in the sciences to discount the experiences,
knowledges, perspectives and priorities of non-dominant communities. The
ASPIRE program outlines a mechanism for transformation of the
Geosciences that reverses institutional discounting of non-dominant
priorities, and supports and elevates asset-based framing of community
cultural capital. This project continues work to understand geoscience
boundary spanners who “have a foot in both worlds” of mainstream
geoscience and community.
Speaker Bio
Lora Harris (she/her) is a professor and associate director of research
at the Chesapeake Biological Laboratory within the University of
Maryland Center for Environmental Science. She is an estuarine ecologist
who applies field and modeling approaches to address questions
regarding nutrient dynamics, primary production, and ecosystem structure
and function in a range of estuarine ecosystems. She is especially
interested in how climate and management actions interact to affect
water quality characteristics in estuaries and lagoons. Lora works
closely with local, state, and regional agencies in both a research and
collaborative capacity. She is committed to efforts that promote
equity, inclusion, and justice in the geosciences through both workforce
development programs and initiatives that have identified best
practices for “equitable exchange” with communities. Lora is committed
to community engagement in her work, and takes just as much satisfaction
in talking about water quality with a Board of County Commissioners, or
listening to residents tired of pollution in their tidal creeks, as she
does in giving a talk at a professional conference.