Episode 27: Episode 27. QR SIG Dissertation Award Winner, Marie Vea

In this episode, Dr. Jenni Wolgemuth interviews the QR SIG's 2021 Outstanding Dissertation Award winner Dr. Marie Vea. Dr. Vea is the Assistant Dean for Student Services and Staff Development at the University of Vermont. Dr. Vea's dissertation is titled Sense of Place and Ways of Knowing: The Landscape of Experience for Black, Indigenous and People of Color in Natural Resources, Environmental Education and Placed-based Learning. The follow text presents a transcript of the recording. ---Jenni  0:25  Hello, everyone and welcome to qualitative conversations a podcast series hosted by the qualitative research special interest group of the American Educational Research Association. I'm Jennifer Wolgemuth, the current chair of the qualitative research special interest group outstanding dissertation award committee. I am very excited to be joined today by Dr. Maria Vea, who is the recipient of the 2021 outstanding dissertation Award for her dissertation titled, Sense of Place and Ways of Knowing: The Landscape of Experience for Black, Indigenous and People of Color in Natural Resources, Environmental Education and Placed-based Learning. Dr. Vea is an assistant dean for student services and staff development at the University of Vermont in the School of environment natural resources, where she has worked and studied for over 20 years. Her areas of research expertise and experience include green jobs and internships, social justice, and engaged learning. Thank you for joining me today, Dr. Vea. I'm really thrilled to learn more about you and your work. So to get us going, I was thinking our audience would appreciate learning more about your dissertation work. Can you talk about your dissertation, maybe about its scope, and its methodological focus.Marie  1:54  Thank you, Jenni. And thank you also for the opportunity to talk with you more and to for the award, I was really honored to stand with so many wonderful researchers, and also to bring some light to some of the work that I and my co researchers and colleagues have been doing. And as you mentioned, so the title of the dissertation speaks a lot to what the content and scope is. So sense of place, and ways of knowing. So where we are in place, not just physically but also metaphorically and figuratively, and ways of knowing epistemologies, how we arrive at the things that we believe we know and are important to us and make meaning of experience. But that's specifically what is experienced for black, indigenous and people of color bipoc folks in the field that I spend the most of my time and career in. So those are places related to natural resources, environmental education, and place based learning. So I've worked in the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources for 17 years, and have worked with bipoc folks coming through those curriculum in the environment, and have found witnessed the challenges that a lot of the students, alumni and colleagues have within environmental learning and working spaces. So the dissertation really focuses on what has been called academic imperialism and epistemic injustice, how ways of knowing and experiences of this population of folks are invisible alized, diminished, erased from the larger environmental narratives. And oftentimes, what I experienced is that when we ask questions about why aren't people of color interested, or in the environmental fields, it's from a perspective of no lacking something, or it's not interesting enough, it's from a deficits, perspective. And this dissertation focuses on the strengths based perspective because, like, with underrepresented folks of all identities, we're here, we've been here and we continue to be here. And why is that? How do we sustain how do we survive? So the dissertation is a strengths based perspective, with co-researchers that are nine alumni of the Rubenstein school. And we came together to share stories and images and reflections in an environme(continued)