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Second-year students Chessa Adsit-Morris, LuLing Osofsky, and Madison Treece Receive SSRC-DPD Fellowships

From left to right: Chessa, Madison, and LuLing in front of a view of the Santa Cruz wharf
July 1, 2018

Second-year students Chessa, LuLing, and Madison were awarded fellowships by the Social Science Research Council’s 2018-2019 Dissertation Proposal Development Program (SSRC DPD). The program is a three year initiative hosted by five universities in the United States, including UC Santa Cruz. This year, fifteen UCSC students from across the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences participated in dissertation-development workshops over the spring quarter and received funding to support exploratory research over the summer.

Chessa will conduct research at the Darwin archives housed at Cambridge University and the Bergson archives in Paris. Her research will explore Darwin’s understanding of the evolution of life through his own writing in order to develop a collaborative transdisciplinary methodology based on horizontal transference and co-species evolution. Madison will conduct interviews over the summer in San Francisco and throughout the Southwest with artists who facilitated social practice art projects. These projects use textiles to address the socio-political conditions of the borderlands and gendered experiences of U.S.-Mexico migration. LuLing will visit several trauma site museums to interview curators and research a trope in museum exhibition displays— the representation of trauma through displays of mass accumulation (e.g shoes, bones, debris). Her dissertation explores how artists and curators utilize the political and educational potential of the sublime in their visualizations of war, destruction and disaster.