CSU’s School of Global Environmental Sustainability (SoGES) has announced the selection of Dr. Laura Raynolds and Dr. Josh Sbicca as Resident Faculty Fellows. The Department of Sociology is very proud to house two of only four fellows chosen from what SoGES calls a competitive field of proposals.

According to this SOURCE article, the fellowship awards are intended to encourage interdisciplinary understanding of complex global environmental issues, foster collaborative cross-campus partnerships, and support sustainability research at CSU. SoGES funds innovative and interdisciplinary sustainability research that addresses grand challenges, involving faculty members and researchers from across five colleges.

Dr. Raynolds will investigate how a sustainable livelihood approach is used to pursue social and environmental goals in non-governmental certification, focusing on Fair Trade’s program in plantation products, and the synergies between these efforts and government policies, focusing on Ecuador’s pioneering Buen Vivir (good living) and Pachamama (rights of nature) policies. The fellowship will support desk and field-based research and lay the groundwork for future collaborations.

Dr. Sbicca will study the potential for prisons to advance food justice through gardening and food production in the United States. This will include creating the first-ever complete list of federal, state, and county correctional facilities run by government entities with horticultural initiatives. With this in hand, Josh will design and conduct two surveys with corrections officials and incarcerated participants in horticultural initiatives to understand how they envision, experience, and carry out socioecological sustainability in the context of mass incarceration.