Faculty Accomplishments

Assistant Professor of Psychology Derek Huffman coauthored a new paper, "Landmarks: A solution for spatial navigation and memory experiments in virtual reality" in Behavior Research Methods. "Research into the behavioral and neural correlates of spatial cognition and navigation has benefited greatly from recent advances in virtual reality (VR) technology," according to the paper's abstract. While there're many solutions for designing two-dimensional (2D) vision-based experiments, the authors write that for research using 3D environments—which has largely relied on video game engines such as Unity to create experiments–lacks the intrinsic flexibility and features necessary for experimental design. "Here, we describe a new custom asset package for building, developing, and deploying navigation-based experiments on desktop and in VR using the Unity game engine, which is freely available for personal use," states the abstract. "This package, called 'Landmarks,' has been integrated with the Unity engine and several Unity asset packages to create a user-friendly suite of tools to facilitate the creation of VR experiments."

Arisa White, assistant professor of creative writing, is a board member of the San Francisco literary magazine Foglifter, which has just won a Whiting Literary Magazine Prize, "a coveted annual award that celebrates emerging literature," reports Datebook, a component of the San Francisco Chronicle. White is also an editor of Foglifter's anthology Home Is Where You Queer Your Heart.

A paper by Professor of Education Adam Howard was published in the journal Educational Review. The paper, "Globally elite: four domains of becoming globally-oriented within elite schools," draws on a multi-sited global ethnography of elite schools across the world, this article explores how elite schools prepare students for an increasingly interconnected world characterized by difference and competition through global citizenship education. In this exploration, Howard identifies the four domains that give meaning to global citizenship education within elite contexts: cultural, relational, emotional, and material. These domains reveal the ways in which these schools are responding to the challenges of globalization by providing students opportunities to develop awareness and knowledge of differences, to establish and maintain relationships across differences, to gain a sense of obligation toward others, and to accumulate valuable forms of human and cultural capital. Through globally oriented practices, students are being prepared to be flexibly mobile, to imagine themselves as leaders within a globalized world, and to thrive in the hypercompetitive and unpredictable global knowledge economy. These practices play an important part in elite schools’ larger strategy of making and remaking elites.

In an article published in the journal Environmental and Sustainability Indicators (available open access here), Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Stacy-ann Robinson develops a richness index for baselining climate change adaptations in small island developing states. Using historical data (1997-2014), she finds that Cook Islands (Pacific) and Kiribati (Pacific) are among the most advanced adaptors and that Guinea-Bissau (Atlantic) and Marshall Islands (Pacific) are among the least advanced adaptors. She concludes that greater investments in ongoing capacity-building in islands are required for countries to better plan, implement, and evaluate adaptation actions, and to better advocate for more optimal levels of international financing for helping to underwrite the cost of adaptation.

A new study by Gail Carlson, assistant professor of environmental studies and director of the Buck Lab for Climate and Environment, and Skylar Tupper '20 has been published in the journal Chemosphere. The paper, titled "Ski wax use contributes to environmental contamination by per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances," looks at these hazardous environmental contaminants at a central Maine recreation center. "We examined the environmental impact of ski wax use at an outdoor recreation area with significant cross-country ski activity by measuring PFAS levels in melted snow, soil, and water following a collegiate ski race. We found extremely high levels of long- and short-chain PFAS (C4–C14) contamination in snow at the race start line (∑[PFAS] 7600–10,700 ng/L), with the longer-chain analytes (C10–C14) predominating," the authors wrote in the paper's abstract. "Our results suggest that ski wax use, from which fluorocarbons abrade at very high levels onto snow during a ski race, are the main source of PFAS contamination at our site. Regulation of ski wax use is warranted to reduce PFAS pollution."

Professor of Education Adam Howard and three students have coauthored a paper recently published in the journal Globalisation, Societies and Education. The students, Jamie Pine '19, Weston Muench '18, and Sarah Peck '17, worked on this research over the course of their senior year at Colby (Pine and Peck as an honors project and Muench as independent studies all year).  The paper, "Securing eliteness class strategies of an elite school in Chile," looks at "The ways in which elite schools in Chile reproduce power and privilege within the nation’s highly inequitable schooling system are largely ignored by researchers and the general public. In this article, the authors address this gap by identifying and exploring the primary class strategies that an elite school employs to secure their elite status. Through these strategies, the school keeps their community closed to the outside world, promotes shared values within their community, and remains faithful to founding principles in their educational project. These strategies allow the school to uphold strong social isolation, to shield them from public scrutiny, to cultivate elite subjectivities, and to forge a framework through which hierarchies are established. The authors argue that these class strategies not only secure the school’s elite status and reputation but also are central in maintaining and advancing their students’ class positioning in Chile.

Christopher Soto, associate professor of psychology, has become a fellow of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP). This fellowship honors SPSP members who have made longstanding and extraordinary contributions to the field of personality and social psychology.

Damon Mayrl, associate professor of sociology, coauthored a new paper "The Archive as a Social World" in the journal Qualitative Sociology. "Historical scholars often adopt a solitary ethic, conceiving of their work as the product of a lonely and isolated individual toiling away in a dusty archive," according to the study. "In this article, we focus on the practice of archival research to demonstrate that this solitary ethic is just that—an idealized representation that differentiates and unifies a group of scholars—rather than a description of the actual research practice of those engaging with historical materials." Mayrl and his coauthor Nicholas Hoover Wilson, assistant professor of sociology at Stony Brook University, argue that the archive’s social character should be understood as a methodological opportunity for historical sociologists, allowing them to maximize and extend their research by inspiring creative research strategies.

Ira Sadoff, the Arthur Jeremiah Roberts Professor of Literature, Emeritus, has published Country, Living, a new book of poems published by Alice James Books in Farmington, Maine. "I go to Sadoff's poems for their rich honesty, their deep humanness, their complexity of vision, and their energy," writes Jane Mead in advance praise for the book. "He is original, wholly relevant." 

Assistant Professors of Environment Studies Stacy-ann Robinson and Gail Carlson, along with Hania Lincoln Lenderking '20, have coauthored a review of recent academic studies on the impacts of climate change on food security in the Caribbean. It finds that climate change will impact agriculture and fisheries mainly through changing patterns of weather, air and sea surface temperatures, and water availability. It concludes that successful adaptation to these impacts should involve region-specific solutions and local communities. The review is published in the International Journal of Sustainable Development & World Ecology.