American Magazine, Nov. 2013

Jane Palmer
Public Administration and Policy, SPA
The task: create a family tree, using figurines,
toys, and animals to represent each person.
The 12-year-old Chicago boy—a survivor of
sexual abuse, with whom Jane Palmer worked
for nine months—selected for himself a turtle.
“He felt he had to have a tough exterior, but
he wanted to work on coming out of his shell,”
says Palmer, SPA/PhD ’13. It was then that she
began to understand the needs of survivors
often overlooked by advocates and academics.
Palmer researches the ways in which
survivors of abuse—who, like that boy,
“aren’t normally part of the conversation”—
seek help. While working on her doctorate
in justice, law and society, Palmer held a
National Institute of Justice fellowship,
during which she worked on a study of
violence against American Indian and native
Alaskan women. “The study’s design had to be
respectful of cultural norms,” she explains. “In
some tribal communities, it’s abusive to cut a
woman’s hair, so it was imperativeto include
questions about that tactic.”
The former social worker and nonprofit
director’s dissertation focused on another
overlooked population: bystanders. Palmer
examined the role of bystanders in situations
of sexual assault and dating violence
on college campuses. She’s continuing
that research today, evaluating bystander
programs at three universities.
“My research captures new ways of
understanding and preventing violence. I have
faith that when we see something that’s not
right, we want to do something. It’s about a
mass of people—it’s bigger than individual
offenders and individual victims.”
Michael Bader
Sociology, CAS
Michael Bader recalls driving through D.C.
as a child and being struck at the sight of
razor wire. Only 20 miles separated his
native Derwood, Maryland, and Southeast
Washington, but the budding urban
sociologist was rattled by what he saw.
“Our lives were completely different, and
our chances were completely different. That
had a big influence [on me],” Bader says.
His fascination with the urban environment,
including a boyhood obsession with SimCity,
led him to Rice University, where he studied
architecture. But his interests soon broadened
beyond buildings to the ways in which city
dwellers navigate the built environment.
“I began to wonder how social and racial
inequality are perpetuated in cities,” says
Bader, a member of AU’s Center on Health,
Risk, and Society, an interdisciplinary
community of scholars that looks beyond
biomedical technology to examine the social
dimensions of health.
Bader, who coauthored a study this summer
on retail investment as a barometer for teenage
obesity, has two projects in the works: an
examination of the ethnic and racial turnover
of neighborhoods in New York City, Chicago,
Houston, and Los Angeles from 1970 to 2010,
funded by the National Science Foundation;
and the Google Street View Project, which
assesses neighborhood walkability and
disorder. The latter is funded by a $250,000
grant from the National Institutes of Health.
Though he’s come a long way from
SimCity, Bader says one of the lessons learned
from the computer game still applies to his
work today: “space matters.”
Garrett Graddy
Global Environmental Politics, SIS
The granddaughter of a Kentucky grower,
Garrett Graddy grew up on the family farm but
never had much interest in the family business.
“Then I started traveling and discovered
that the plight of the small-scale farmer was
both personally and intellectually intriguing.”
High in the Andes—3,000 miles from home—
“I discovered my research question.”
A cultural geographer and political
ecologist, Graddy researches agricultural
biodiversity conservation across the Americas.
This year, she published a pair of journal
articles about her work with six indigenous
Peruvian potato farming communities, who
have repatriated 1,000 native varieties of their
crop in hopes of adapting to—and surviving—
climate change.
Graddy’s research on the seed banking
system helping farmers in Parque de la Papa
(Potato Park) diversify their crops figures
prominently in the book she’s penning
on the politics of agricultural biodiversity
conservation. It highlights the genetic
erosion of crops around the globe, the history
of conservation measures, and the seedsaving
movement, which is taking root in
the United States.
To cultivate a crop base that’s adaptive and
diverse, the seed-saving movement encourages
farmers to use open-pollinated, heirloom
seeds—passed down from generations—rather
than seeds from a store.
“A grower with a beloved seed variety will
trade it with her neighbor,” says Graddy. “On
the ground, agricultural biodiversity looks like
heirloom seeds. They’re beautiful and packed
with cultural memory and indigenous identity.”
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