TEDC 2015 Faculty Grant Recipients Present Research for Earth Week

 TEDC 2015 Faculty Grant Recipients from across The New School will be presenting their projects on April 18 at 12 PM as a part of Earth Week at The New School.

Timon McPhearson Ph.D

Connect the Dots

Connect-the-Dots is an urban design and ecology project seeking to innovate connections between fragmented, disconnected urban green spaces (dots). Ecosystem integrity in New York City, like in most cities, is challenged by urban development, in particular because of lack of corridors and connections between parks and smaller green spaces that can allow species and genes to move. Designing a networked ecological infrastructure throughout the city can improve the mobility of urban species and provide benefits far beyond individual species, serving also as a source of ecological improvements in the health and wellbeing of New Yorkers.

Ana Baptista Ph.D

Climate Justice in Action: Grassroots Strategies for a Just Transition

All across the country, grassroots organizations are actively engaged in material and discursive struggles to resist neoliberal modes of development that exploit natural and human capital. In collaboration with the Climate Justice Alliance (CJA), a national network of environmental justice organizations around the country, we undertook an in depth study of the articulation of alternative models of sustainable development through the framework of Just Transition discourse among CJA member organizations. Just Transition strategies embody a shift from the fossil fuel, capitalist economy to locally-based, culturally embedded, living economies promoting self determination and environmental justice. The case studies of eight grassroots organizations from Richmond California to Jackson Mississippi, reflect the diversity of practices and practical challenges associated with implementing alternative systems of economic and environmental well-being. This study highlights some of the key insights resulting from their engagement with the Just Transition framework, across diverse strategies such as: energy democracy, solidarity economy, land use control, political and cultural organizing, and democratic governance practices.

Willi Semmler Ph.D

Burden Sharing of Climate Policies

Along the line of research in our Oxford University Handbook of the Macroeconomics of Global Warming, jointly edited with Lucas Bernard, my current research focuses on both mitigation as well as adaptation policies. Mitigation policies are cap™, carbon tax, replacing fossil fuel by renewable energy, regulatory policies and so on.  Adaptation polices concerns providing buffers, provisions and infrastructure against climate risk arising from global warming (sea level rise, flooding, severe droughts, food losses, desert formation, storms, and hurricanes, damages to eco-systems).Yet, most research is not spelling out how such climate policies should be funded. Often those proposals pit current against future generations. We want to show that there is a better way to deal with this problem. There could be contributions by the current generation to such funding (through a carbon tax) as well as by future generations through, as Jeffrey Sachs proposes, issuing green bonds. Thus we can introduce a novel angle towards climate justice present in a single economic model where then both generations are better off.  We thus study climate change climate policies which lead to a fairer solution within and across generations.

Ivan Ramirez Ph.D

Temporal Discontinuities of Cholera Emergence in Northern Peru: Should We Blame Climatic Change?

This research critically examines the temporal links between climate change and cholera emergence in northern Peru. Overall, study findings provide evidence that a climate link, mediated by local hydrology, existed in the latter part of the 1990s, but found no evidence of climate impacts on cholera emergence in the earlier part of the decade. Explanations for this temporal discontinuity in climate-cholera relationships will be discussed.

Nicholas Brinen

Design-Build Public Space

The DOT Street Seats program is a seasonal public space that reclaims portions of New York City’s streets for much needed public space. These public spaces generally include decking, guardrails, and seating/tables for a neighborhood. This first prototype from Parsons allowed students to collaborate with the DOT on developing a new Street Seats design. The 40ft x 6ft structure built by Parsons students at the Northeast corner of 13th Street and 5th Ave, incorporated necessary seating components and went further to incorporate materiality, vegetation, and graphic identity. The structure was fabricated in the Parsons fabrication shops and assembled in a single day on site.

Timo Rissanen Ph.D

Designing Endurance: Investigating User-Centered Fashion Design

Designing Endurance investigates the use of clothes in a design context, and in particular practices that can prolong the useful life of a garment, such as repair and customization. The aim is to uncover motivations behind wearing an item among a choice of many, as well as decisions leading up to laundering and eventual disposal of the garment. In the project I am collaborating with a team of performance artist-researchers with the aim of capturing and communicating knowledge that traditional design research methods may not capture.