Geography's Aletha Spang & Sarah Kelly Receive Arts Integration Grant

The Geography Department's Aletha Spang (GIS Specialist) & Sarah Kelly (Lecturer) received an Arts Integration Grant for their communal quilting project!

Quilting for Resilience: Stitching Together Stories of Mutual Aid from Vermont's Floods
Sarah Kelly, Research Scientist in the Energy Justice Clinic at the Irving Institute for Energy & Society and a Lecturer in the Geography Department | Aletha Spang, GIS Specialist, Department of Geography | Charis Boke, Lecturer, Department of Anthropology

In the aftermath of Vermont's 2023 floods, this project helps support community resilience by combining participatory art and mapping. Through collaborative quilting, the project will engage community members in the Black River Watershed and Dartmouth College in visualizing social relationships and mutual aid efforts that were vital for flood recovery. This work will reveal the social and spatial patterns of disaster response in rural areas, helping to inform future mitigation efforts and strengthen community networks.

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The Arts Integration Grant Program is an initiative to support arts-centric research, incubate interdisciplinary projects and advance faculty-student mentorship. In the 2024/25 round of the initiative, launched by the Hop and the Vice Provost for Research with funding from the Office of the Provost, approximately $100,000 was awarded to four faculty-led and six student-led projects following threads from wellness, medicine, business, digital humanities, studio art, geography, music, VR and film. 

Text from teh HOP wesbite. Read full announcement here.