Recent friucdavis_rw items

Making Meaning of Vocational Pathways using Open Storytelling: Braid as Method and Medium

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This paper provides details on how Braid--an online platform for reflection, community, and learning--functions. Drawing on student vocational reflections and their thoughts on using Braid, This paper offers initial findings for educators, researchers, and institutions seeking to better understand the use of digital platforms to advance academic outcomes, including the development of disciplinary knowledge, critical thinking, communication skills, and students' capacity for reflective practice, narrative meaning-making, and the integration of learning across academic, professional, and civic contexts. This project was completed as part of the National Science Foundation SEEKCommons fellowship program.

Semi-open data platform for exploring socioenvironmental data alongside ecological data in the context of the AmazonFACE project

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This project is an interactive webGIS dashboard built for the AmazonFACE research context and developed part of the National Science Foundation SEEKCommons Fellowship. Its main goal is to merge ecological field data and socioenvironmental or ethnobotanical knowledge into a single exploratory platform. The core idea is that ecologists often work with tree-level forest data such as abundance, traits, and spatial distribution, but do not always have a way to connect those ecological observations to information about how species matter to people, such as food, medicine, construction, or other uses. This dashboard was designed to make that connection visible and easily explorable.

Centering Community in Transportation Policy: Lessons from Biking While Black Policy Report

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This policy brief offers insights to policymakers based on the work of Biking While Black (BWB), a community-rooted project that seeks to make bicycling safe for Black and Brown people and further goals of mobility justice. BWB mobilizes community voice to make this problem visible and envision safe and dignified active transportation for all. Consisting of two short films, a companion guide, curriculum and community discussions, BWB uses lived experiences as necessary data to inform reformative change. The mobility justice framework used by BWB prioritizes dignity, belonging, and community power.

Mobility Justice: A New Framework

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The purpose of this report is to define and document the origins, definition, and themes of mobility justice. Methods included a literature review of both academic and activist usages of the term and interviews with early mobility justice leaders. Results revealed that mobility justice emerged as a concept simultaneously in academic and activist spaces. The field of critical mobilities studies began conversations in academia. Conversations in the field began among sustainable transportation practitioners who also identify as Black, Indigenous, or people of color, particularly at gatherings of a collective called The Untokening. Interviewees expressed the importance of respecting this genealogy and the definition as laid out by these leaders. They defined mobility justice as a movement towards liberation for all, particularly those most marginalized by systems of oppression. Mobility justice’s origins are grounded in past civil rights movements, especially for Black people. As...

Community resilience and the dynamics of relatedness and residence in a rural Zimbabwean village from 1986 to 2010

Wed, 12 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Social resilience to challenges is an important component of sustainability. We explore the diversity and flexibility of the social networks of a rural Zimbabwean community in order to understand their resilience in the face of the AIDS epidemic, hyper-inflation in the 2000s, and increasing variability of rainfall due to climate change. We combine socialnetwork analysis with ethnographic accounts to find that broad concepts of relatedness help families adopt AIDS orphans, while household structures are flexible over time, with small groups forming in lands newly available for re-settlement. Change in household membership was attributable more to immigration/emigration than to birth/death.

Exploring Values in Action using Autoethnographic Methods: Workshop Guidelines

Wed, 12 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

There is a growing appreciation for the importance of values in research. Questions of values are related to but different from conversations about ethics. Whereas ethics focuses on presumed shared societal values, values focus on what is important to an individual or a community. When viewed positively, values foster group cohesion and bolster motivation and resilience. When viewed negatively, values are seen as introducing bias into science. Viewed practically, values are virtually always present in research through the questions we ask, our assumptions, chosen methodologies, analysis, how we respond to reviewer feedback, publishing practices, and outreach. Research institutions, disciplines, and fields of study all have values that they promote, whether these are stated implicitly or explicitly.

We propose that recognizing what these are and how they converge or diverge from one’s own values is a crucial reflective process for researchers. When they converge,...