Natalie Slater is a second year student and Mellon Community Engagement Fellow. In partnership with the nonprofit Art Access, Natalie created and is facilitating an artist collaborative called Embodied Ecologies that looks at environmental health issues in Salt Lake from the lenses of environmental justice and disability justice.
Jeff Rose, Ph.D., is teaching the Environmental Humanities Program’s new Community Engaged Learning course during the Spring ’22 semester. Jeff is an assistant professor-lecturer in the Department of Parks, Recreation, and Tourism and an affiliate faculty with the Global Change and Sustainability Center at the University of Utah. Prior to this position, he taught geography and environmental studies at Davidson College in North Carolina.
We are so excited to welcome Alastair Lee Bitsóí as our Spring ‘22 Practitioner-in-Residence! Alastair is from the Navajo Nation community of Naschitti, below the Chooshgai Mountains on the New Mexico–Arizona state line. He is currently the Southern Utah reporter for the Salt Lake Tribune. He has been an award-winning news reporter for the Navajo Times and communications director for the Indigenous-led land conservation nonprofit Utah Diné Bikéyah. His consulting business, Near the Water Communications and Media Group, trains media, nonprofits, businesses, and governments in cultural sensitivity.
Anne Whitehouse is a recent graduate of the Environmental Humanities Graduate Program (December 2021). Last summer, Anne interned with Seven Canyons Trust, a local nonprofit dedicated to daylighting and restoring the impaired waterways of the Salt Lake Valley. Urban waterways was a theme of her thesis as well, which explored the relationships between women and urban waterways under colonial rule in Pak T’ae-won’s 1938 novel Scenes from Ch’ŏnggye Stream.
LaUra (she/her), a 2012 Environmental Humanities graduate, is a truth-seeker, community-builder, cultural critic, and grief worker. She is also the granddaughter of a holocaust survivor. Inspiration finds her in natural landscapes and honest, open-hearted dialogue. She is the founding director of the Good Grief Network and has been studying and cultivating personal and collective resilience strategies for nearly a decade. She is trained in nonviolent civil disobedience and is a Climate Reality Leadership Corps member & mentor.