Yup. No fear is exactly what a student needs to turn some wild idea they dreamed up over coffee into a real “thing”—a thing you can touch, see, and use.
Welcome to the Makerspace: a place, Cambridge Dictionary tells us, “where people can come together to create or invent things, either using traditional crafts or technology.” Puget Sound launched its new Makerspace this fall and held an open house for campus members.
Last spring, 80 students were selected to receive summer research grants to support 10 weeks of independent research in the sciences or humanities under the guidance of a faculty advisor. Projects covered a wide range of topics, such as wastewater opioid analysis, the influence of hip flexibility on running gait, LGBTQ and person of color representation in young adult fiction, environmental racism, and more, including:
“Stories matter. Stories are a reflection of power.” When Alicia Garza, a founder of the Black Lives Matter movement, said this during her keynote address at the close of the 2018 Race & Pedagogy National Conference held on campus last September, it struck me that this was the crux of the conference. Its title,“Radically Re-Imagining the Project of Justice: Narratives of Rupture, Resilience, and Liberation,” was a call for participants to share their stories and to speak into the spaces that have rendered them invisible.
Siddharth Ramakrishnan, associate professor of biology and the Jennie M. Caruthers Chair in Neuroscience, has a weird brain. He is a master of the microscopic details and concepts of neuroscience—while a research scientist at Columbia University, he designed microchips to record from brain cells, and in his lab at Puget Sound, he studies the development and physiology of reproductive neurons in zebrafish—but he is also a creative visionary, capable of a more spatial, fluid way of seeing the world.
Mauricio Mendez ’20 was 3 years old when he first experienced otherness, being pushed to the margins of a world that he had believed to be his own. Another child at daycare had spit in his face, and though he spoke no English, having recently moved to the United States from Mexico, Mauricio was determined to tell the teacher. “The lady didn’t understand,” he says. “The only other way to explain it was by demonstrating.”
