FIELDWORK PROJECTS

Our recent-past, ongoing and future projects. We specialize in applied folklife, oral history and multi-media documentation work around the intersections of environmental health, environmental justice, food justice and food access. We're happy to conduct many kinds of folkloristic fieldwork; but our in-house specialities are ecological and occupational folklife, and we bring an ecological and process-attentive method to any expressive cultural genres we document. We've particularly worked, in the past four years, to help document and amplify vernacular voices in ecological food and farm movement in Ohio; and in movements for environmental justice concerned with place-based and everyday toxicity and chemical exposure in Ohio's fracking counties, and in Southwestern Philadelphia. Here's a sample of the large fieldwork and survey project we've been responsible for. 

OEFFA'S GROWING RIGHT: ECOLOGICAL FARMING, 1970s-NOW

Ongoing public environmental folklife project combining documentary fieldwork in, to date, upwards of thirty-five Ohio counties. Project charts the movement history of the organic food and farm movement in Ohio since the 1970's and documents the work, stewardship and place-attachment of farmers, grocers, and activists involved in the movement. Project also involves a significant public folklore component, and has launched over eighteen pop-up exhibits at grocery stores and farmers' markets across the state, and a multi-media website. See here for more. 

EASTWICK ORAL HISTORY PROJECT -- EASTWICK, PENNSYLVANIA

Dynamic public environmental humanities project focused on everyday experiences of toxicity in a SW Philadelphia neighborhood situated atop two Superfund sites. Community-collaborative and co-curated project designed in close collaboration with the Eastwick Friends and Neighbors Coalition (EFNC). Designed during Jess's fellowship year with the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities (PPEH), in collaboration with Jeffrey P. Nagle, and with input from Patricia Eunji Kim and Paul Mitchell, with input from Bethany Wiggin.  

FARMING IN THE AGE OF FRACKING (EASTERN OHIO)

Ongoing folklife and multimedia fieldwork project charting everyday experiences of living and working the land in Eastern Ohio counties impacted by the new "oil and gas" boom due to hydraulic fracturing. Fieldwork in the following Ohio Counties: Ashtabula, Columbiana, Carroll, Harrison, Guernsey, Belmont, Muskingum, Morgan. Project also documents the built heritage of extractive industry in Eastern Ohio and the overlay between sites of recreation and sites of extraction, with material culture and participant observation-based fieldwork at AEP's ReCreation Land, Senecaville Lake and at pipelines and fracking well sites across the region. 

Currently working towards a short 16mm film from Summer 2017 fieldwork on three organic farms in Eastern Ohio's Fracklands.