In pursuit of full freedom: an archaeological and historical study of the free African-American community at parting ways, Massachusetts, 1779-1900

African Americans living in the small community of Parting Ways, near Plymouth, Massachusetts, realized their newly achieved independence through the construction of homeplace using the material culture of respectability and socioeconomic integration into the community. I expand upon a previous study of this community, which identified evidence that the former slaves retained African cultural traditions, to analyze material evidence of consumption and subsistence. This study reveals that African Americans living at Parting Ways crafted identities that emphasized independence, refinement, and respectability despite living in a society that stereotyped African Americans as dependent members incapable of full social participation. The archaeological data come from five seasons of excavation, 1975-1978 and 1989, on the properties of two African-American families who lived at Parting Ways. I situate the artifacts together with deed, probate, court, town, and census records to construct a detailed historical context in which to interpret the material practice of daily life, identity creation, and community formation. Paternalism and dependence, features of slavery in New England, continued after emancipation and were seen at Parting Ways through the actions of town leaders who permitted the families to build houses on public lands and also assumed legal and financial guardianship of the families. Within their homes, however, the families participated in the material culture of respectability through the rituals of tea drinking, refined dining, formal clothing, and the use of orthodox medicines. The records reveal that they also participated actively in the town's economic life by exchanging their manual labor for agriculture products like cattle heads and feet. Through their household goods, their customs, and their labor, these families embodied respectability, integrated themselves into the community, and constructed a homeplace--a place of refuge, family building, and identity formation. At Parting Ways, African-Americans worked to negate the implications of their continued dependence on town leaders by developing individual personas that espoused the values of independence, freedom, refinement, and family unity - and in so doing defined their own participation in Plymouth, and American, society

Measurement of Interfacial Adhesion in Glass-Epoxy Systems Using the Indentation Method

The adhesion of coatings often controls the performance of the substrate-coating system. Certain engineering applications require an epoxy coating on a brittle substrate to protect and improve the performance of the substrate. Experimental observations and measurements of interfacial adhesion in glass-epoxy systems are described in this thesis. A comparison study of how different glass treatments affect adhesion was also conducted: smooth versus rough, clean versus unclean, stressed versus non-stressed. The Oliver and Pharr method was utilized to calculate the bulk epoxy hardness and elastic modulus. Spherical indentations were used to induce delaminations at the substrate-coating interface. The delamination sizes as a function of load were used to calculate the interfacial toughness. The interfacial fracture energy of my samples is an order of magnitude higher than a previous group who studied a similar glass-epoxy system

Building Statewide Community-University Partnerships: Working with the Maine Municipal Association

Karen Hutchins and Eric Conrad’s “dialogue” illustrates the relationship between researchers from the University of Maine and the Maine Municipal Association (MMA). The stimulus for this unfolding relationship was the administration of a survey by the Sustainability Solutions Initiative Knowledge-to-Action group to Maine town officials about their experiences with, interest in, and preferences for university-community partnerships. Although municipal officials are interested in such partnerships, Hutchins and Conrad point out the need for improved communication and relationships with officials, so that they recognize researchers’ abilities (and limitations) in addressing municipal concerns

Articulating Identity in and through Maine\u27s North Woods

Land-use changes can interrupt relationships to place, threaten community identity, and prompt instability, altering the social and physical context and impacting the present and future state of the social–ecological system. Approaches that map system changes are needed to understand the effects of natural resource decisions and human–nature interactions. In this article, we merge theories of articulation, the event, and symbolic territory into a critical framework to analyze online newspaper article responses and blogs referencing a land-use controversy in the State of Maine, USA. Application of this framework reveals land-use controversies as place-making events that alter contexts and sense of place, and precipitate the re-articulation of identity in relation to, and through, symbolic territory

Improving Maine’s Future through Education: Overcoming Challenges and Learning to “Row” Together

Although people agree that education is a crucial ingredient in the mix of factors that will improve Maine’s economic prospects, we often come at the problem from different angles and develop different methods to improve educational outcomes. In this article, Linda Silka, Karen Hutchins, Meredith Jones, and Chris Rector assert that progress in securing a bright future for Maine requires working together across disciplines and areas of expertise to support education. The authors present nine recommendations for strengthening Maine’s educational systems

Addressing the Complexities of Boundary Work in Sustainability Science through Communication

Sustainability science seeks to identify and implement workable solutions to complex problems. This transdisciplinary approach advances a commitment to work across boundaries that occur among individuals, disciplines, and institutions to build capacities for informed and innovative decision making in the face of uncertainty and change. The concept of boundary work and related discussions of boundary objects and organizations are important, expanding focal areas within sustainability science. While communication is described as central to boundary work, insights from the field of communication have largely yet to inform theorizing about boundaries within sustainability science. In this paper, we highlight three communication perspectives, namely media studies, collaboration and partnerships, and systems theories, which are particularly relevant for understanding how boundaries form, the social context in which boundary work occurs, and informed strategies for enhanced boundary spanning and management. We use three case studies to illustrate how communication theories and methods provide dynamic and strategic lenses within transdisciplinary processes to enable collaborators to build capacity for change, sustain critical and reflective inquiry, and approach difference as generative in collective efforts to produce sustainability

Strengthening Knowledge Co-Production Capacity: Examining Interest in Community-University Partnerships.

Building successful, enduring research partnerships is essential for improving links between knowledge and action to address sustainability challenges. Communication research can play a critical role in fostering more effective research partnerships, especially those concerned with knowledge co-production processes. This article focuses on community-university research partnerships and factors that influence participation in the co-production process. We identify specific pathways for improving partnership development through a prospective analytical approach that examines community officials’ interest in partnering with university researchers. Using survey responses from a statewide sample of Maine municipal officials, we conduct a statistical analysis of community-university partnership potential to test a conceptual model of partnership interest grounded in natural resource management theory and environmental communication. Our findings both support and advance prior research on collaborations. Results reveal that belief in the helpfulness of the collaborator to solve problems, institutional proximity, familiarity, perceived problem severity and problem type and trust influence interest in developing community-university partnerships. These findings underscore the benefits of proactively assessing partnership potential prior to forming partnerships and the important roles for communication research within sustainability science, especially with regard to strengthening partnership formation and knowledge co-production processes

Socialization to interdisciplinary: faculty and student perspectives

Interdisciplinary research and education are a growing emphasis in United States institutions of higher education but relatively little is known about the doctoral students engaged in these atypical programs. The purpose of this study was to understand the socialization process of 18 students involved in a large-scale, federally funded, interdisciplinary research project focused on sustainability at one university. Using Weidman, Twale, and Stein’s framework of graduate student socialization, themes emerged related to (a) their distinctive characteristics and cultures, (b) the learning process, (c) balance, (d) uncertainty, and (d) support. Recommendations for policy and practice are included

Moving beyond the single disciplines: Building a scholarship of engagement that permeates higher education.

Communities face complex problems that are best addressed by integrating the perspectives of multiple disciplines, yet many forms of engaged scholarship remain disciplinarily specific. Universities struggle to bring together highly disparate disciplines linking knowledge with action to address community problems. Sustainability is an important example of a complex, urgent problem that is best addressed by integrating multiple disciplines. In the United States, a unique multi-year initiative, Maine’s Sustainability Solutions Initiative (SSI), addresses sustainability problems by working across disciplines on engaged research. Scholars, representing multiple disciplines and most of the higher education institutions in the state, working with their community partners, are addressing sustainability problems related to landscape change, specifically urbanization, forest ecosystem management, and climate change. This initiative is composed of over two dozen interdisciplinary, engaged research projects that include diverse stakeholders (e.g., nongovernmental organizations, communities, policy organizations, and governmental leaders) as members of the research teams. Reflecting on the challenges of involving multiple disciplines in research projects, we discuss SSI as an exemplar of interdisciplinary, engaged campus initiatives. The scale and reach of the initiative (on-campus and statewide), the number of disciplines and stakeholders involved in the project, and the conversations around engaged scholarship occurring at the University of Maine capture the challenges and opportunities of moving the scholarship of engagement beyond the isolated work of individual disciplines