Celebrating Our Contributors #3

In the past two years, we have been celebrating members of the EHN community who, despite the difficulties posed by COVID-19, completed their degrees—and we would like to continue that tradition of celebrating our contributors’ achievements.

This March, we once again published a series of posts to showcase the work and recognize the accomplishments of nine EHN contributors who graduated in the past year. Today, in this third and final post, let’s toast to Katie Schroeder, Ramya Swayamprakash, and Natalie Wilkinson!

Dr. Katie Schroeder

Give us your elevator pitch. What was your dissertation?
While pulling at a different research thread on public health in New York, I came across an all-but-forgotten riot that took place at the Staten Island Quarantine Station in 1858. A mob of neighboring residents razed of over thirty acres of government-owned property. The quarantine facility, built for the express purpose of protecting the health of New Yorkers, was destroyed in the name of health and safety. This seemingly paradoxical event brought community rights to the forefront of public health in the mid-nineteenth century and tested the applicability of long-held nuisance laws in the midst of rapid population growth and urban development. My work demonstrates how politics, community-level activism, violent protest, and even the will of the mob, shaped the trajectory of public health in the United States.

What was one thing that stood out to you, a cool find you came across, or something that surprised you in the course of your research?
Though the mid-nineteenth century context of the riot may lead one to assume nativism and anti-immigrant sentiment stood at the heart of the riot, my research found that this was not the case. The object of violence was the physical structures of the quarantine facility, rather than its patients. In fact, not a single patient was harmed. I used quantitative methods to compile decades of official reports, and charted immigration rates alongside the financial wellbeing of the institution. I found that lay individuals did not debate the medical utility of Quarantine, but its environmental, economic, and political impact on the surrounding community.

Tell us a little bit about your process. Was there anything unique about how you did the work?
In 2018, shortly after completing the bulk of my archival research, I was fortunate enough to land my dream job in Honolulu doing applied historical research. Completing a dissertation while working full-time as a historical researcher, I found it difficult to shift gears between projects. I started approaching my personal research with the same organizational methods that my day job required. I set strict deadlines. I relied on structure. I broke each chapter down into a highly organized set of arguments and supporting arguments.

The biggest turning point for me was when I learned to love the blank page. I took each point from my outline and created a separate word document with a very short (250) word-count goal. More often then not, I easily overshot that goal. I soon found folders on my desktop filling up with single page documents, written to my overarching structure, that came together with minimal effort and transition work. A fresh blank page didn’t scare me anymore. I had already turned hundreds of them into useable writing for my dissertation. 

What kept you going?
When I began my dissertation research, I struggled with the “so what” question. In 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic brought quarantine to the forefront of every conversation, the opposite became true. I saw the applicability of my research every time I turned on the news, spoke to my neighbors, or refreshed my social media feed. I was motivated by connecting threads between this historic event and our current crisis, and the value of seeing both in tandem.

Dr. Ramya Swayamprakash

Give us your elevator pitch. What was your dissertation?
My dissertation revolved around dredging—a seemingly inert process of removing river bottom sediment and depositing it elsewhere. I showed how dredging along the Detroit River from 1874 to 1938 helped create landforms across and along the political border, in turn, revealing the myriad social and political tensions that undergird it. By exposing how infrastructure revealed border tensions, especially those related to resource extraction, scarcity, and national security—on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border—I offered a new way to link environmental and border history as well as environmental diplomacy.

On the surface, it is hard to think that dredging does anything really. But then when one takes a step back and realizes that between 1874 and 1968, dredging in the Detroit and St. Clair rivers reduced the water levels of lakes Michigan and Huron by over 25 cm (according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration). That’s a huge amount of water. Furthermore, we often think of the North American Great Lakes as being these ginormous, ‘natural’ bodies of water. My work shows how the lakes are, in fact, more part human part nature because how much water they carry depends so much on diversions in and out of the system as well as dredging. Dredging then lets us see longer-term processes and ideas that we may often take for granted.

What was one thing that stood out to you, a cool find you came across, or something that surprised you in the course of your research?
That the Great Lakes are actually mostly human plumbing at this point. Humans control water levels and even ensure 6% of Lake Superior’s water flow comes from another watershed. Thinking about the Great Lakes I think changes how we think of them and our future, together.

The second cool thing that continues to amaze me is the level of local engagement, especially on Canadian shores against dredging and its aftereffects i.e. dumping the dredged material. Repeatedly, citizens from Amherstburg and Windsor used every avenue available to them to fight a larger city like Detroit as well as a body like the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Tell us a little bit about your process. Was there anything unique about how you did the work?
My process was not very organized. I started writing and my marriage fell apart, and then the pandemic started. Actually, around the time I started writing chapter one, I was trying to sleep-train a 7-month-old and fighting for custody. My process was survival 🙂 But more seriously, I think a lot of parents say this: I wrote when I could and quickly realized what a luxury it was to be able to sit and write for hours. I am not sure I am necessarily unique in this, but I tried to work visually, creating concept maps and physical maps as I went along to keep me sane and my archival material intact. Because the changes I tracked were so small but also so significant my challenge was always trying to answer the “so what” question and mapping them out helped. 

Before writing specific chapters though, I did try and map them out as much as possible. The outlines helped to keep me on track, especially because I was writing in fits and starts. I also took as detailed notes as possible when it came to archival documents. For what I thought was one of my chapters, I pretty much laid out all the notes in one order and that was the body fabric of two chapters.

What kept you going?
As a person, I am very persistent and tenacious. I had a not-so-great experience at a PhD program in India years before I started work on the Detroit River which made me take a hiatus from academia for a while. So, when I eventually meandered back into a PhD program, I came in with eyes wide open and promised myself that I would finish, no matter what. A part of what kept me going was the confidence that what I had to say was new and important. It helped immensely that some people much smarter than I also concurred. And last but not the least, my child, Matsya. I don’t quite know how to explain it but becoming a parent cemented my belief that I had to finish. So I kept going, one imperfect sentence and sometimes incomplete thought at a time. 

Natalie R. Wilkinson

Give us your elevator pitch. What was your thesis?
My thesis is about the colonization of Yosemite National Park, but I cover a much longer and wider history. I think any history about colonization ought to first cover the Indigenous peoples and their relationship to the land on their own. I start by looking at the communities of first peoples across California, and try to look at their oral traditions and native science as deeply and genuinely as I can in the limited pages a thesis contains. California’s history grapples with a wave of plagues, colonization, and the federal and state government-organized genocide. This genocide began in Mariposa County which neared the borders of modern-day Yosemite National Park. Native science was not considered when committees and western scientists began making their way into Yosemite and dictating how the park would be taken care of. We can still see the effects of this arrogance and ignorance on the ecologies at play and the policies of the U.S. National Park Service.

I consider the politics of place heavily. Yosemite is a place before it is Yosemite; it is a land that was bordered, taken, and named, and not necessarily in that order. Because it is a place, people can be from this place, and that possibility is at odds with the foundations of the conservation and preservation movements. Preservation began as a means of keeping resources from some and for others. The park, Yosemite, was created for recreation and use by future generations. This means anyone can experience it but only temporarily. In this interpretation, preservation means, “You can not be from here.” Yet it is locals, natives, who contributed significantly to making it what it was: an astounding utopia of ecological diversity. And it is locals now who make it what is. My thesis asserts that the past and modern-day management have an evolving mission statement that has consistently worked against itself. If interested in reading more, you can find my thesis here.

What was one thing that stood out to you, a cool find you came across, or something that surprised you in the course of your research?
What stood out to me was the origin of a lot of hypocritical attitudes we see in environmentalism today. The idea that we have to protect the land by not letting people be native to it is the very thing that is destroying California’s ecosystems. Another aspect that stood out to me is that we can look to the past for answers about how to evolve our lifestyles, government, and policies, into more mutually beneficial relationships with our land. I am not advocating we go back in time, but rather learn more about our past relationships with the land to aid us in a transition. It is obvious to me now from this research that what is needed is a shift in cultural thought about belonging to a place.

Another thing that stood out to me was the role of women in stewarding the land. Traditionally women have been healers, farmers, arbiters or knowledge, and community leaders and all of this is true, especially in regard to the land and resources of their communities. These histories are everywhere and learning about them was the most beautiful part of this research.

Tell us a little bit about your process. Was there anything unique about how you did the work?
My process involves a lot of drafting. I write and rewrite. I follow my curiosity and write way to much about whatever I want. Then I share this with friends and confidants who help me do a lot of weeding and reorganizing. For 90 percent of the time, there is no thesis and barely even chapters, it is in chunks and pieces. Then, in the end, things come together like a tent, it pops up all at once.

In the beginning, my thesis was a simple change-over-time argument. The landscape in Yosemite National Park changed over time. By the most recent drafts of this paper my thesis evolved into the differences between three time periods. At the same time, I was working on developing the conceptual themes and how they would thread through the actions of the historical actors. A lot of this thesis came together in Yosemite when I traveled there to work as the research library intern and learned about the feud between self-identified locals and the park management staff. I saw the dynamic as an extension of an antagonistic relationship which started about 170 years earlier. The experience of witnessing this dynamic, highlighted the victorian ideas around nature as they were applied on the ground, and how strong they have held.

What kept you going?
Maybe this is not the answer anyone wants to hear but fear of failure was a big reason I continued, and yet it was also what slowed me down. There’s a sort of terror in knowing that others have invested in you. Research is personal for me. Writing is personal. I would never feign objectivity. So when I share what I am writing, I am sharing a lot about how I think and it is terrifying. It is hard not to interpret the possibility of failure as being a failure. 

The biggest reason I was able to complete my thesis at all, however, was my mother who time and time again pulled me out of my own slump and back to the computer motivating me to keep going in a healthy way. I also had several key friends from my history department and others who checked in on me and encouraged me to keep going.

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*Cover image: “Amphibious Thinker” by EHN’s content editor Evelyn Ramiel.

[*Cover image description: An artful collage of different overlapping and layered images of pictures and objects. In the background, there is a white spiral notebook, overlaid with clippings of printed texts that are geometrically arranged. There is also an airplane ticket, a picture of a pair of scissors, as well as a cutout of a brick building with many windows. At the center of the image lies a royal blue seal, with icons of the four seasons, a clock, and a desk with the silhouette of a graduating student in their academic robe, reading a book. In the foreground and at the bottom of the image, there is a bright pink lizard with purple polka dots and a layer of soil.]