Working with the Pima County Food Alliance and a variety of community organizations, Applied Humanities majors spent the semester focused on ways to design and implement a more resilient local food system.
The students in Jasmine Linabary’s PAH 420 class, “Innovation and the Human Condition: Learning How to Improve Life in the Community and Beyond,” worked in groups to partner with a dozen local organizations like the Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona, the Tucson Family Food Project, and the International Rescue Committee’s New Roots program to better understand the needs and opportunities in the local food system.
“It’s a basic needs issue around which everyone can relate and connect and a pressing, very complex challenge facing our communities,” said Linabary, Associate Professor in the Department of Public and Applied Humanities. “Some of my own research, teaching and service has centered around food for a number of years. Everyone has experience with food and even if you haven’t had the experience of being food insecure, you know what it’s like to be hungry.”
Students in the class engaged with their community partners several times throughout the semester, volunteering at least five hours each as they learned about the organizations and how they respond to community needs. For the final projects, students were required to tell a compelling public story that centered the community’s needs, while grounded in rigorous research and ethical values.
“This project is focused on building resilience. There’s a lot of need we’re hearing from folks in the community, and it’s a prime opportunity to bring students to community partners who have a wide variety of needs right now,” Linabary said. “It’s important for students to create work that’s valuable for the partners in terms of usability or implementation, but it’s also about the relationships that students formed with partners.”
For Molly Bisbee, Katelynn Resendez, Jasmine Worcester and Will Barth, working with the IRC’s New Roots program brought them alongside a program that supports refugees with plots of land, seeds, tools and education to grow for themselves as well as to sell.
“At first, we thought the New Roots itself would need a better digital footprint, but the program is at capacity, so we turned our attention to ways to assist the farmers and gardeners themselves,” said Bisbee, majoring in Applied Humanities – Business Administration emphasis. “We created multilingual brochures (in English, Spanish and Swahili) to both explain the scope of the program and tell some personal stories of some of the farmers and gardeners. These are like business cards so they can market themselves, but they don’t have to answer a lot of questions since they don’t speak English as a first language.”
Emily Griffin, Alexis Valencia and Jacob Cermak partnered with the Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona to create an art installation celebrating Earth Day at the Santa Cruz River Farmers’ Market. Community members responded to prompts the students wrote, centering on themes of community, food, nourishment and ways to protect the Earth.
“An art installation is captivating when you walk by, so we can spread awareness of food insecurity in a creative way that gets people to think about things differently,” said Griffin, who majors in Applied Humanities – Fashion Studies emphasis and minors in business administration. “You can only learn so much in the classroom, but once we were working with the community, we got to make connections and learned a lot through conversations about Earth Day.”
With the variety of community partners, Linabary was able to pair students with partners whose work they could be more passionate about.
“One of the really interesting things working in the food system is there are so many different aspects of food. We have students across our major who are interested in a whole range of different things with their lives after graduation. Some of the students who were more interested in the business side of things might have been partnered with a farmers market, for example,” she said. “This issue space allows for all those different interests.”
The Applied Humanities major has 14 different emphasis areas, ranging from Business Administration to Public Health to Rural Leadership & Renewal, with the student project teams emphasizing the transdisciplinary nature of the program.
“We have student groups that are mixed in terms of their emphasis areas and that really enriches the discussion and allows for students to bring in their other course work or skillsets and experiences. Part of what we’re teaching is to collaborate well, not just with community partners, but with each other,” Linabary said.
The class focuses on approaches and skillsets grounded in the humanities and how those can make a difference compared to projects that originate in other fields.
“Flexibility and adaptability are skills that come especially from Public and Applied Humanities work. It requires to you deal with ambiguity and learn ways to communicate with different kinds of audiences,” she said. “The ability to empathize is a big one. Students are really cultivating the ability to listen deeply, to go into a community and listen for context and recognize there’s a history here. We’re not just interested in transactional relationships, but instead thinking more transformatively about the work.”
Students from the class have already expressed interest in continuing relationships beyond the course. Some have indicated interest in continuing volunteering and have already been applying for internships and jobs with their own partner or others from the class.