Stories about "Society and culture"
11 words: Students describe indigenous archaeology in an Alaskan village

Friday, October 11, 2019 12:25 pm

At the site of an abandoned Alaskan village, an alumnus hears 11 words illuminating experiences of students and their professor conducting indigenous archaeology.

Associate Professor of Theater Christine McDowell’s has curated Museum L-A 's shoe exhibition.Museum L-A’s gallery is filled to the brim with shoes for its newest exhibit “Footwear: From Function to Fashion.” The exhibit explores the whimsy and artfulness that shoe designs have played with for decades to acknowledge that shoes, while primarily used as an often-forgotten functional item, can be masterpieces in their own right. A certain focus is placed on the extensive history of the shoe industry in Auburn, once the fifth largest producer of footwear in the country, through a timeline representing the ebb and flow of the local companies historically making shoes in our community. This exhibit is Museum L-A’s next step in the progression of telling this industry’s story – this time focusing on the product that was being created by the millions right in our little corner of Maine while also creating an opportunity to celebrate the 150th Anniversary of the City of Auburn, 1869-2019.
Q&A: Christine McDowell unpacks her shoes

Thursday, October 10, 2019 2:00 pm

In her written greeting to visitors entering an exhibition in Lewiston, Bates theater professor Christine McDowell bares her sole.

Lecturer in Environmental Studies Ethan Miller '00 at Wild Mountain Cooperative at 217 South Mountain Road in Greene where his wife Kate, and their son, Loren, 6, who live cooperatively with a group of people, including short term residents Katharine Gaillard ’19 and Kyra Bleicher '19, both with Bates Garden experience, who are apprenticing with Kate in the herb garden, aka the community apothecary. With medicinal plants.Pictures include the group harvesting medicinal herbs (including Spilanthes), picking apples, peaches and grapes (Clementine and Somerset Seedless), and working on building a tree house in the woods. Loren has just learned to ride a bicycle (he taught himself) Says Bleicher: It's a great place to be inspired by dreams and schemes of the people here and to create your own in the midst of it."Wild Mountain Cooperative is a multifaceted collective effort: we are a cooperatively-run subsistence and medicine farm, a gathering place for transformative teaching and learning, a wildlands sanctuary, and a small cooperative living community. We are situated in Greene, Maine, within a 300 acre wildland preserve that embraces the entire watershed of a 40 acre lake called Berry Pond.
Q&A: It’s time for a new paradigm in our view of how to live, says Ethan Miller

Thursday, September 26, 2019 3:45 pm

In a 2019 book, Bates lecturer Miller calls for a fundamentally new approach to the conversation about living sustainably.

Supervised by Holly Ewing, Christian A. Johnson Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies, environmental studies major Christopher Castaneda ’20 takes water samples from Lake Auburn. He’s studying nutrients produced by algae and consumed by other organisms in the lake. Related to the impacts of algae blooms on water quality, the research supports community efforts to deliver unfiltered public water at the lowest price. On the boat with Water treatment manager and lab director Chris Curtis (in blue shirt) and Lindsay Bates and Dan Fortin, water quality technicians (Bruins sweatshirt)
Video: Topher Castaneda ’20 builds community as a Residence Life leader

Friday, September 20, 2019 11:20 am

What's Topher's story? Using stories to build understanding among first-year students.

Eva Meltzer Murray ’85 leads residents on Matinicus Island while loading a U-Haul full of recycling to be delivered mainland on August 7, 2019.A book author and essayist, she’s been a year-round resident of Matinicus Island for more than 30 years, starting as a teacher and now a leading island citizen involved in many island issues.
My Maine Summer: Eva Meltzer Murray ’85 and trash day on Matinicus Isle

Friday, September 13, 2019 8:53 am

Twenty miles off the Maine coast on Matinicus Isle, where Eva Murray ’85 has lived for 30 years, ”if you have a problem, you gotta fix it yourself.”

At today's Opening Convocation ceremony, keynote speaker and honorand Dolores Huerta @doloreshuerta, an icon of the labor rights movement and civil rights leader, helped usher in the academic year at Bates by encouraging the Class of 2023 and the broader Bates community to become active in the fight against racism, anti-semitism, and sexism.Clark A. Griffith Professor of Environmental Studies Jane Costlow
My Last Year: Scenes from Jane Costlow’s final year of teaching

Tuesday, September 10, 2019 4:46 pm

This new series will follow Jane Costlow — esteemed Bates teacher, scholar, and colleague — month by month during her 34th and final academic year.

My Maine Summer: Eric Stirling ’97 and a faraway getaway

Wednesday, August 21, 2019 3:22 pm

Eric Stirling and his family represent a longstanding vacation tradition virtually unique to Maine: the wilderness sporting camp. In 2003, Eric became the sixth generation of his family to operate West Branch Pond Camps,

“We are piloting the experiment for these students’ thesis experiments. They were piloting Hannah’s experiment. She’s interested in looking at the extent to which visual masking actually inhibits perception. So when you take a visual mask, you take an image followed by another image, you’re impaired at understanding the first image. The question is why. So what we’re going to do is take the neural activity that we’re measuring. And the nice thing about EEG is that it measures millisecond by millisecond electrical potentials that are generated in the brain , we measure them from the scalp. And we can see over time what the brain is processing and we use machine learning, we put these signals into a computer system tha t reads out the extent to which there is information about what the picture is. We’re wondering, does that information persist when you change the image? Does that persist over time? Hannah’s made the experiment, and we are going to try it out to make sure everything’s ready for participants.”? Michelle Greene, assistant professor of neuroscience, says of three thesis students in neuroscience: “They’re all terrific, I might add.”Hanna De Bruyn ‘18, Old Lyme, Conn. (black striped sweater with glasses)Katherine “Katie” Hartnett ’18 of St. Paul, Minn. (wearing EEG cap with Bates sweatshirt)Julie Self ’18 of Redwood City, Calif. (blue plaid shirt)Email from Hanna: Katie Harnett and I will be testing out our computational neuroscience theses and will be hooking each other up to the EEG tomorrow, Friday, at 12:45-2:30ish in the Bates Computational Vision Lab (Hathorn 108). 
Bates announces $3.97 million National Science Foundation grant for visual database project

Friday, August 16, 2019 11:02 am

The largest-ever federal grant awarded to Bates, the award will fuel creation of a vast video gallery to support research in various fields, including artificial intelligence.

A price subsidy for organic fruits: Good economics, or not?

Friday, August 16, 2019 10:24 am

Bates economist Nathan Tefft and his colleagues wondered: Would a price subsidy on organic fruits benefit wealthy households at the expense of poorer ones?

My Maine Summer: Steve Kingston ’88, the Clam Shack, and Maine’s best lobster roll

Tuesday, August 13, 2019 3:35 pm

For tourists who trek to Maine on a quest for lobster, Steve Kingston '88 of the Clam Shack is their deliverer.

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