04/17/2018
In the fall of 2018, former Natural History Research Experiences intern G. Maris Jones will begin a joint PhD in Anthropology and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She plans to do graduate work at the intersection of race, culture, climate change, and government policy. Maris's current research is focused on climate change vulnerability and adaptation pratices of communities in coastal regions and small island states of the African diaspora. Through her work, she hopes to create a living archive of narratives of climate-displaced individuals and complicate the discourse around resiliency with accounts of community resistance. Recently, Maris was awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and was named an alternate for the Ford Foundation Pre-doctoral Fellowship. For her NSF grant, Maris proposed a comparative study of Post-Katrina New Orleans, Louisiana and Post-Maria San Juan, Puerto Rico to investigate the efforts of the "second disaster", or the cultural and social uprooting that occurs when communities are displaced following an extreme weather event, on diasporic African communities. Through this research, Maris aims to understand the ways these communities utilize cultural production and embody traditional ecological knowledge inherited from their ancestors as a survival pratice when faced with insufficient government assistance in the wake of a disaster. She is particularly interested in the ways such practices allow marginalized communities to resist the subjugation and erasure of their bodies by the state. Learn more about her previous work at www.gmarisjones.com
