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Narmeen Rashid

By Taylor Pedersen, CLA Student Writer - May 14, 2025

By the time Narmeen Rashid reached college, she had already lived in four countries across three continents. Born in Portland to Pakistani parents, Rashid spent her formative years following her father’s assignments with Intel Corporation to New Mexico, Israel, China, and Pakistan. That global upbringing, she says, shaped her, not only as a traveler, but as a person—curious, compassionate, and determined to make an impact.

“It made me more open-minded,” she said. “You see so many different communities and so many different ways of living. I think that’s what inspired me to want to do hands-on work—helping the people I’ve seen who don’t have as much as I do, especially in Pakistan, to give back to where I came from and my family.”

It’s a throughline that has guided her path at Oregon State University, where she transferred to from the University of Oregon, after initially being a biology major with dreams of becoming a doctor. After taking an international politics class with Dr. Michael Trevathan at the School of Public Policy, Rashid pivoted to becoming a political science major (with an economics minor). Dr. Trevathan’s class felt less like a requirement and more like a revelation.

“It literally took me two classes,” she laughed. “It was like a switch flipped in my brain. I just thought—this is so fun. This is what I want to do forever.”

Rashid became lab manager for Trevathan’s Global Political Research Lab, helping lead a project examining representation in environmental non-governmental organizations (NGO). The findings were frustrating but not surprising: “Even in Southeast Asia or Africa, the advisory boards of these NGOs were mostly made up of men. There just weren’t enough women represented.”

That experience cemented her desire to pursue advocacy, but it wasn’t just academic. Rashid also saw gaps in the community on campus, especially for Muslim and Pakistani students. She grew up surrounded by a tight-knit Muslim community in Portland, but in college, the same environment was harder to find. Instead, throughout her four years at OSU, Rashid created those same inclusive spaces, fostering equitable communities and organizations that will continue long after she graduates. 

“I didn’t realize how much that mattered to me until it was gone,” she said. “My parents made sure I had people around me who shared my culture. So in college, I’ve tried to create those spaces for others too.”

As President of the Muslim Student Association, Rashid did exactly that—building a community where students could share their thoughts, celebrate their faith, or just feel at ease. She also served as an ASOSU senator and now leads as the Diversity and Inclusion Director, programming events and supporting marginalized student communities across campus. Her initiatives often center student voices—whether by advocating for international student fee reform or pushing back on administrative decisions that could hinder diversity work.

When modesty concerns kept some women from using the pool at Dixon Rec Center, Rashid started a Hijabi swim night. She also co-founded the now-popular International Communi-Tea Hour, a weekly event that draws dozens of students for snacks, games, and low-key conversations.

“By week four or five, students were running it themselves—playing games, talking, laughing,” she said. “It was just really beautiful to watch a community grow.”

At the same time, Rashid serves on both the President’s Council on Leadership and Excellence and the Freedom of Expression and Academic Freedom Council—spaces where she acknowledges the challenge of representing diverse perspectives as just one person.

“But even if I can bring a little bit of what students are going through, that helps,” she said. “It’s about showing up and making sure someone is in the room.”

This fall, Rashid will take the next step in her journey at Brown University. The graduate program, she said, offers the kind of hands-on learning that excites her most, especially the opportunity to design and implement real policy in collaboration with community partners.

Eventually, Rashid hopes to return to Pakistan and work in human rights, supporting underserved populations and continuing the kind of advocacy that’s become second nature to her.

“I think impact isn’t always big and flashy,” she said. “If I can help even one person live a better life, that’s enough. That’s the legacy I want—to make my parents proud, to give back, and to leave the world just a little bit better than I found it.”

“I’ve learned that building spaces—where people feel safe, where they feel seen—that’s real leadership,” Rashid said. “And it’s what I’ll keep doing, wherever I go.”

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Harnit Mahal

By Colin Bowyer, Communications Manager - May 14, 2025

Harnit Mahal, ‘22, loved to learn, but wasn’t too keen on school. Mahal’s parents, who immigrated to Northern California from Punjab, India, stressed the importance of receiving a comprehensive education. In middle school, Mahal joined Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID) college preparatory program, then Upward Bound (now TRiO), which brought her on a college visit to Oregon State.

“OSU was my first college tour,” said Mahal, “and I immediately felt comfortable. There was something about being on OSU’s campus and in Corvallis that I could see myself here.”

Mahal joined the College of Liberal Arts as a first-generation student in psychology, but after taking Interpersonal Communication (COMM 218), she decided to add speech communication to her academic resume. 

“I was still interested in psychology and learning about the inner workings of the human brain,” explained Mahal. “But I found that communications looked at a person’s behaviors and actions more holistically. Bringing in speech comm. to complement psychology was one of the best decisions I ever made.”

The Covid-19 Pandemic disrupted Mahal’s plans to study abroad in the U.K. (which she did virtually instead), but that didn’t stop her from becoming more involved on campus through Beaver Connect and the Educational Opportunities Program (EOP). She also became an academic counselor and coach on campus, helping other students excel at their own studies.

When considering what to do after receiving her bachelor’s degree, Mahal wanted to continue in the field of communications. She looked at graduate programs around the country, but Mahal decided to stay at OSU and in the School of Communication.

“I already felt so comfortable at OSU, but the School of Communication was even more welcoming and supportive of me during my undergraduate, and now graduate, studies. Faculty commit to an open door policy and are always willing to lend a helping hand or share their perspectives.”

Upon starting her master’s work, Mahal received a teaching assistantship, as well as a scholarship from Philanthropic Educational Organization (P.E.O., Chapter EK), which allowed her to focus on her health communication research. Mahal is examining if cultural adherence informs the diet and exercise habits of South Asians, and ultimately, rates of cardiovascular disease. 

“I want to make access to healthcare easier for immigrants and to find ways to improve communication in healthcare settings,” said Mahal. “I see this research as a way of giving back.”

In the future, Mahal can see herself moving into a physician liaison role and further bridging the gaps in healthcare delivery.  She’s also open to going back to psychology.

“Health communication is ultimately so interdisciplinary that I have more options than I know what to do with.”

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Nichole Blum

By Taylor Pedersen, CLA Student Writer - May 14, 2025

Nichole Blum has spent her career at the intersection of education, equity, and advocacy. With nearly two decades of experience in early childhood education—including time as a director, program leader, and educator—she has seen firsthand the challenges facing both young children and the professionals who care for them. Now, as a graduate student in the College of Liberal Arts’ OSU’s applied anthropology program studying alongside Dr. Melissa Cheyney, Blum is diving deeper into the structural issues she observed in the field, using innovative research methods to explore childhood stress, communication, and the wellbeing of the workforce.

Blum knew from an early age that she wanted to work with children and families, but she was also certain she did not want to teach in a traditional school system. A guidance counselor placed her in a preschool classroom during her senior year of high school, and she was hooked. She pursued a Child Development Associate credential immediately after graduation, launching her into the world of early childhood education.

Her career took a pivotal turn when she began working at the YWCA in Kalamazoo, Michigan. This was her first experience not only in nonprofit work but also in addressing domestic violence, sexual assault, and human trafficking through early childhood programming. “That changed everything for me,” Blum recalled. “I started to see early childhood education as a vehicle for change. It’s not just about childcare or learning—it’s a safety net for families, a way to connect them with resources and become a trusted part of their lives. That’s when I started approaching my work differently.”

While building her career, Blum was also slowly working toward her bachelor’s degree at Central Michigan University—one class at a time. She became a mother at 21, and with the need to provide for her son while continuing her education, she made strategic career moves. Her Child Development Associate credential allowed her to advance into leadership positions, doubling her income while she chipped away at her degree. When the COVID-19 Pandemic began, Blum saw an opportunity. She continued to finish her degree online at her own pace while also working full-time. But the real challenge came when she moved across the country to attend OSU in person for graduate school.

“I was hit in the face with the reality of being a first-generation college student,” she said. “It was my first time in an on-campus academic setting like that, and I didn’t know anyone here. But I had this inner knowing—I needed to go and I saw anthropology as a way to bring a kind, human-focused science into the early childhood space.”

At the School of Language, Culture, and Society, Blum’s research focuses on non-language childhood communication, particularly how young children express emotional stress. Her ethnographic study employs a technique called “body mapping,” an art-based method traditionally used with adults in trauma-exposed populations, such as HIV patients or survivors of violence. Now, Blum is adapting it for young children. Her study asks children to draw on outlines of their own bodies, marking where they feel stress and how they experience emotions physically. Through this process, she is uncovering new insights into how young children process stress—insights that could have broad applications for early childhood education and mental health support.

“Three- and four-year-olds don’t always have the words to describe their experiences,” she explained. “We’ve been socialized out of some of the ways we naturally communicate. Body mapping gives them a different way to express their emotions—it allows their voices to be heard in a way that isn’t restricted by language.”

Blum’s work also extends beyond theory. She uses a community-based participatory research model, meaning she doesn’t just study early childhood professionals—she works alongside them. Over the past year and a half, she has volunteered in an early childhood program, trained staff in body mapping, and involved them in every stage of the research process. “I didn’t want to be the researcher who just comes in, collects data, and leaves,” she said. “I wanted to ensure that the workforce itself saw the value in the research—that they saw themselves as researchers, too.”

By integrating educators into the research process, Blum hopes to shift the perceptions of early childhood professionals. Too often, she argues, they are undervalued, underpaid, and left out of policy conversations despite their critical role in child development. She hopes to bridge the gap between policy and practice, making systemic issues more tangible and actionable for educators, parents, and advocates. “There’s been so much focus on children and families, which is obviously important,” she said. “But early childhood professionals spend eight hours a day with these kids. Sometimes they see them more than their own families do. If we really want to support children and families, we need at minimum an equal focus and effort on supporting the workforce.”

Her long-term goal is to improve working conditions for early childhood educators, particularly the 98 percent of the workforce who are women—many of whom are women of color. “This is domestic work, and we have a social bias against that,” she noted. “These professionals are being asked to create environments where children feel safe, trusted, and free to explore, yet they themselves are working under stressful, unsupportive conditions. That has to change.”

As she continues her graduate studies, Blum remains committed to that mission—working to reframe early childhood education not just as a stage of learning, but as a powerful force for equity, well-being, and systemic change.

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Maham Furqan

By Colin Bowyer, Communications Manager - May 7, 2025

Born and raised in Lahore, Pakistan, Maham Furqan, Ph.D. ‘23, was well aware of the U.S. energy policy before even starting her public policy doctoral program at Oregon State University.

After graduating with both bachelor and master’s degrees in economics from the Lahore College of Women University and Government College University, Furqan began working for the American financial giant Standard & Poors Global (S&P) in Islamabad. At S&P, Furqan was a member of the global energy team analyzing the U.S. energy sector.

“It’s a bit ironic that while living in Pakistan, I was working for an American company studying American energy production,” said Furqan. “But the topics I was working on at Standard & Poors aligned so well with my Ph.D. studies at OSU.”

Furqan moved to Corvallis in early 2020, a less than ideal time given the emerging COVID-19 Pandemic. Living in the sparsely populated International Living Learning Center felt “isolating” to Furqan when it was difficult to make friends from a distance. Though, faculty and advisors from the School of Public Policy helped Furqan adjust to the challenging circumstances of moving to the other side of the globe for her studies during a once in a lifetime pandemic.

“My weekly, socially-distant conversations with Brent Steele, Hilary Boudet, David Bernell, as well as other grad students were a lifeline during that time,” said Furqan. “They all created such a great community within the cohort of Ph.D. students, which not only helped me come out of my shell, but also with my research.

As a Fulbright scholar at OSU, Furqan studied microgrids, a localized, independent electrical grid, and their use to serve communities during and after extreme weather events in an era of climate change. Her dissertation aimed to answer how state-level regulatory frameworks, in this case California and Oregon, around microgrids evolved to incorporate the value of resilience. 

“The U.S. energy infrastructure is aging, which is making it more expensive and difficult to maintain,” explained Furqan. “I wanted to explore from a policy perspective if rural communities attempted to establish their own independent microgrids. The implications are particularly relevant with rural communities becoming increasingly cut off from the centralized grid after extreme weather events, like what we saw with the wildfires in Northern California.” 

Employing a qualitative analysis of 250 policy documents and over 50 interviews with policy makers found the relative usefulness of microgrids, but a dearth of funding, regulatory capacity, and policy maker interest in supporting these projects.

“Microgrid advocates see resilience in establishing a closed electrical grid by not having to rely on utility companies for consistent energy,” explained Furqan. “But for opponents, it comes down to cost and scalability. Policy makers see it as a cost of repairing an outage versus the cost of avoiding an outage. ‘Why spend millions of dollars for small, more isolate projects for communities that sometimes have less than a thousand people?’”

Furqan’s interest in community resilience came from her own experience at S&P, where she worked with electrical transmission data on aging infrastructure. At S&P Furqan was analyzing why the cost of transmission and distribution of electricity has gone up, despite the decreasing cost of generating power.

“Even though cheaper, more efficient power was being produced by novel renewable sources, the average consumer saw no real reduction in their price per kilowatt/hour. Where was the system failing? I started to think more about how it’s the utility’s responsibility to create a resilient power network, but it was the resilience of the community that mattered when the utility failed.”

After graduating from the School of Public Policy in 2023, Furqan moved back to Lahore to start her own energy consulting firm, Betelgeuse. While running her own business, Furqan is also a visiting fellow at the Oxford Institute of Energy Studies, research affiliate at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, and consultant for the World Bank.

“The faculty at the School of Public Policy helped me in so many ways beyond academic performance,” said Furqan. “They pushed me and made sure I was putting in the effort to prioritize myself. I wouldn’t be here without them.”

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Rebecca Wheaton

By Ellie Webb-Bowen, CLA Student Writer - May 7, 2025

Rebecca Wheaton, a second-year anthropology Ph.D. student, is studying the relationship between local ecological knowledge and socioeconomic development. Wheaton is a member of the socio-cultural team of Water Quality, Ecology, & Knowledge Co-Production in the Klamath with Professor of Anthropology Bryan Tilt. The team is partnering with the Yurok Tribe in Northern California, as well as agricultural producers, fishing communities, and local residents in the Klamath Basin to understand how the dam removal and river restoration will affect their livelihoods. 

“It’s a massive, ongoing ethnographic project,” explained Wheaton. “Our goal is not only to contribute to the academic literature, but also to support informed, community-based decision-making around resource management and environmental governance. We hope our findings will be useful to agencies, educators, and local nonprofits working to make decisions that are both culturally grounded and ecologically sound."

Before attending the School of Language, Culture, and Society, Wheaton grew up in eastern North Carolina. After attending the University of North Carolina Wilmington, she was able to independently explore what anthropology meant to her by moving west. Wheaton worked as a ranch hand in  Colorado for many years, where she became interested in sustainable agriculture. Working at a 224-acre working ranch in Carbondale, Wheaton was immersed in hands-on research, including soil building, landscape design, water systems management, as well as livestock and dairy operations. 

“I was constantly making notes or inquiring about how things functioned on the farm from the perspective of an anthropologist.” explained Wheaton. 

That kickstarted her interest in the human dimensions of food systems work. In 2017, Wheaton moved to the Snoqualmie Valley in Washington to work at a farm & conservation non-profit as an environmental educator program coordinator. Then during the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic and maternity leave, she commuted regularly over Snoqualmie Pass to work towards receiving her master’s in cultural and environmental resource management from Central Washington University (CWU). 

Wheaton’s master’s thesis tracked food as it moved through different social contexts, as plants in the wildcat farm, as commodities in the campus stores, and as charitable donations to the student-run food pantry. Drawing from over 200 hours of ethnographic fieldwork, Wheaton showed how food became a way to establish relationships between people at CWU. She examined the student-food landscape to understand where and how students at CWU were getting their food.  

“I was attempting to shed light on how resources were being distributed to either promote or hinder the success of student food access initiatives and their community impact,” said Wheaton. “Comparing student community needs and perspectives with administrative decision making, there was still a discrepancy between availability and accessibility.” 

During her nearly two years as a Research and Evaluation Manager at Cardea, Wheaton co-led equity-focused social impact evaluations that supported local food systems, including King Conservation District’s Regional Food System program. Alongside her colleagues, she worked with farmers, food nonprofits, and local leaders in King County to design culturally responsive evaluation tools, collect and analyze data, and present findings through clear visual reports, helping guide community-based decisions that improved food access and strengthened local agriculture.

Now in the College of Liberal Arts’ Applied Anthropology Ph.D. program with over a decade of experience in cultural and environmental resource management,  Wheaton is interested in coastal communities in southern Oregon and northern California and the impacts due to the Klamath River dam removals upstream in Oregon. Wheaton’s socio-cultural subteam is looking to answer: how can diverse views of Klamath Basin communities inform resource management decisions?

Wheaton continued, “The more I’m in these interdisciplinary spaces, the more I see social science playing a really interesting and important role. As an anthropologist, you are continuously navigating an insider-outsider perspective, reflecting on your identity in relation to your research,  and always engaged in relationship-building work. In these larger research projects, the time spent building these relationships and working relationally is invaluable.”

With summer research funding through Oregon Sea Grant’s Malouf Marine Studies Scholarship, Wheaton’s part of the larger project, focuses on ocean commercial & recreational salmon fishing in a region long dependent on Klamath River fish stocks. Once a thriving habitat for Chinook salmon migration, the dams upstream prevented Salmon from migrating to their spawning locations. With the removal of the dams, Chinook are now returning to the river and its tributaries.   Wheaton’s mixed methods ethnographic study, still in its early stages, will document how fishing communities understand and perceive fisheries management strategies in the wake of the dam removal. She’s also collaborating with Yurok Tribe researchers who are doing similar work with Yurok tribal members.

Though Wheaton’s fieldwork is just ramping up, funding disruptions have put the project’s continuity at risk. As a student and mother, her ability to stay engaged in environmental research depends on the kinds of support programs Sea Grant provides. Without them, the opportunity to document this ecological and cultural transition may be lost, leaving a gap in understanding that can’t easily be filled later.

"Cultural ecology is the study of how people shape–and get shaped by–the environments in which they live,” said Wheaton. “Dam removal and large-scale river restoration projects are bringing changes to the Klamath Basin and these changes are coming in the midst of ongoing environmental, social and economic challenges and opportunities. As I move into fieldwork, my research seeks to surface the deeply influential ways communities understand, respond to, and imagine change. In doing so, I aim to contribute to environmental research that values not only what we can measure, but how we know, relate, and create visions for the future.”

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Cleavon Smith

By Selene Lawrence, CLA Student Writer - May 7, 2025

Cleavon Smith has always been a writer, even before he knew it. His reverence for the written word was something he carried with him since childhood, and something that guided him to Japan, San Francisco, and more recently, to Corvallis. Smith grew up in a small town in Mississippi. It was the same town his mother grew up in, on land that Smith’s grandmother owned, a remarkable feat for a Black woman without a formal education in 1940s Mississippi. The support of his family, especially his mother, had a significant impact on Smith’s early life. “She was raised by a really strong mom, and she did the same for me,” Smith recalled. “So much of my background is influenced by their hopes and dreams.” 

When he was 17, Smith received a Congressional nomination to attend the United States Naval Academy, where he played football. He hadn’t initially planned on a military career, but Smith was eager to continue his education in a place that offered connections and professional support. “I was going to do my five years and go back to Mississippi because I did not see myself living outside of that state,” he explained. “Once I got out of the academy, I had a succession of great mentors; one mentor really encouraged me to recognize my own potential and to see what was possible for me in the Navy. That experience was what made me think about a career as a naval officer, and has influenced the way I approach teaching. I had these mentors who didn't know it at the time, but they were absolutely inspiring. It inspired me to be intentional in each and every interaction with my students.”

As he embarked on his naval career, literature remained the heart of Smith’s world. “I don't think I've read as much since I've gotten out of the Navy,” Smith said. “My desire to write flourished there, strangely enough. Even when I was in grad school, I don't think I read as much as I did when I was at sea.” As his career progressed, Smith became immersed in international literature. Whenever he went abroad, he made it a habit to read books from the countries he would be stationed in. “I just read as much as I possibly could. Part of it was that I didn't think that everyone should have to orient themselves to me as an American. Through the books, I got an understanding of where I was going; it just made me that much more attentive to language, and it made me attentive to how much could be communicated off the page.” 

In the early 1990s, Smith attended the Navy Supply Corps School in Athens, Georgia. During that time, the University of Georgia held a gathering of Nobel laureates of literature in preparation for the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. Many celebrated authors attended, including Wole Soyinka, Czesław Miłosz, Toni Morrison, and 1994 Nobel recipient Kenzaburō Ōe. Smith attended the event with a friend from his days in the Naval Academy, and made it his goal to familiarize himself with the work of every visiting laureate. After reading a translation of Ōe’s acceptance speech, Smith soon became captivated by Japanese literature. He found resonance with Ōe’s work, as well as that of Kōbō Abe, Yukio Mishima, and Yasunari Kawabata. “Once I started doing that, I put in my request to be stationed in Japan,” Smith explained. “Then once I was there, it went from a novelty to an obsession. Just being there, being immersed in the culture, I realized how much I had been missing. It really influenced my writing voice.” Smith spent two years living in Japan, a time that would be a major turning point in his life and career.

After his time in Japan ended, Smith moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he would remain for the next chapter of his life. One day in his late 20s, Smith found himself in the hospital at Travis Air Force Base in Northern California, awaiting the CT scan that would hopefully explain his persistent headaches. Ultimately, it was nothing serious, but as he waited, he began to imagine what his life would look like if he had to consider the worst outcome. “I just projected forward,” he said. “I'll go back to the DC area, you know, and see a lot of my friends there. Then I'll go home to Mississippi and be with my family. But then it was like, no, I don't have that time to waste. I haven't written the novel that I want to write. It was there that I realized that doing anything other than writing felt like a distraction to my purpose.” 

Smith had been on the path with serious intent to become an admiral in the U.S. Navy but resigned his commission, knowing deep down that his purpose was to write. He started taking classes through a local college and for the first time, he found himself in a community of writers. “I just wanted to write,” said Smith, “the instructor for the class, Floyd Salas, was probably, even to this date, the most passionate teacher I’ve ever had.” Salas encouraged Smith to seek out an M.F.A. program to continue his education. Following his mentor’s advice, Smith was soon accepted into Mills College (now a part of  Northeastern University’s global university system) in Oakland to study under renowned poet Chana Bloch, who had been a translator of Yehuda Amichai, one of Smith’s favorite poets. 

Smith pursued fiction writing throughout his graduate program and went on to teach creative writing after graduating. While teaching at Berkeley City College, Smith invited a playwright in his department to give a lecture to his class on the dramatic arts so his students could learn from someone with experience in the field. After the lecture, his coworker challenged him to write 10 pages of dialogue to simulate writing a short play. Smith took up the challenge, and something clicked. He soon joined the creative community at PlayGround, a theatre company dedicated to uplifting emerging playwrights, where he would submit a short play every month in hopes of being selected for a staged reading. 

“I got in that program and it was like being in grad school again,” Smith recalled. “They were giving me practice. I didn't have a theater background; I never saw professional theater until I went to college. What really informed that growth was watching other people and just seeing what was possible: how other people approached the different topics and the varied ways that people told their stories. I've had to learn a lot. I've seen a lot of stuff out there. In a lot of ways, I am grateful for it, because I feel that my writing is still young. Not young in spirit, but I feel like I still have several years to go before I come close to reaching my potential. It’s fun, there's something exciting about that.” Since then, Smith has become an established figure in California’s theater community, particularly in the Bay Area, where many of his plays have been produced. 

“What I like about theater is that it’s less of a medium for my writing, but more like a medium for my dilemmas. I try to present plays in which there's no easy answer, and we're just modeling, just sitting through the question. A lot of my personal dilemmas, and the limits around identity specifically, get presented on the stage. But more than that,” Smith said, “theater making is so incredibly collaborative, there’s just immediate appreciation and gratitude for other people's craft and art. It's going to be different each time with who you're working with; all the minds come together and create this very unique experience that can't really be replicated. That sustains me.”

After two decades of teaching in the Bay Area, Smith was ready for a change. He moved to Corvallis with his family three years ago, initially planning to focus on his writing. “I was burned out. The last thing I wanted to do was teach again, and part of it was because it was the first time that I was ever in a position to focus on my writing without being distracted by work. I wasn’t completely over the Bay Area, but I was definitely over teaching there,” he said. “Being here in Oregon was a chance to start from scratch. After a year of being here, I just felt like I needed a little bit of that energy, that spirit that comes with being in the classroom.”  

As Smith considered his reentry to academia, he discovered a number of his friends and classmates from graduate school were working at OSU. CLA’s Dr. Elizabeth Helman encouraged Smith to look into Oregon State’s theater program, and Smith soon started as an instructor at both the School of Visual, Performing, and Design Arts and the School of Writing, Literature, and Film. “After one term, I was kind of hooked,” Smith said, “it was great to be back in the classroom and quite honestly, I very much admire the student body at OSU. They have a lot of curiosity and an incredible amount of intellectual humility. Every class I've had has been a complete and utter joy.”

In the spring of 2024, Smith’s most recent play The Fillmore Eclipse completed its San Francisco run at Honey Art Studio. In March 2025, Smith completed a script consultation for Elvis Evolution, which is scheduled to open in London this May. Smith is currently working on several projects, including a theatrical adaptation of Tyler Merritt’s memoir I Take My Coffee Black, as well as a play inspired by his son’s favorite childhood book, for which he recently acquired the rights to adapt. Smith is also developing an original speculative script about love, grief, and creation. The story follows a widower grappling with the loss of his wife and his feeling of abandonment after she refused chemotherapy to spend her final months writing a book. “It’s very different from anything I’ve written before,” Smith said. “It’s forcing me to see the world in new ways and take new risks which are foundational in creating art.”

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Students of ART 360/460 Creative Field Work - Creative Desert

By Colin Bowyer, Communications Manager - April 30, 2025

Over summer 2024, 18 students in disciplines from across campus traveled to remote Lake County, Oregon, for an unique experiential learning course, Creative Field Work - Creative Desert (ART 360/460). The five day excursion led by School of Visual, Performing, and Design Arts senior instructors Andrew Myers and Michael Boonstra, invited students to engage in intensive site-based creative research, collecting and creating art informed by their individual and collective experiences in the high Oregon desert.

“One of the formative questions we asked ourselves when designing our Creative Field Work programming was ‘what does an art program at a land-grant university look like?’” said Boonstra. “This class is based on the students’ observations and interpretations of what they see, hear, and feel in this extraordinary environment. During the trip, each student brought their own aesthetic sensibility to the cohort but were also informed by their shared experience of place.”

The class was based at Playa Center for Art and Science on the edge of Summer Lake, but over the five days, students traveled to surrounding locations of environmental and cultural significance, including Paisley Caves, Lake Abert, and recent wildfire burn scars. Exploring the varied landscapes and ecosystems not only allowed students to grasp the geologic history of the region, but they also considered the history of human interaction with the landscape and the various connections between those aspects of the place.

Some of the oldest evidence of human habitation in Oregon can be found in Lake County. Lake Abert is a major stop for migratory birds and was once part of a large inland lake called Lake Chewaucan which also included the Summer Lake area. People have lived in this area for over 14,000 years at times when it was much wetter and verdant. Now, Lake County is one of the least populated counties in Oregon, with a density of one person per square mile, the county’s eight thousand square miles consists mostly of agriculture and ranching.   

“Humans have left their own marks and scars on the landscape,” said Myers. “We wanted students to notice, observe, and collect what they’re experiencing. In the simplest way to put it, ‘what are you seeing? What more is there?’”  

Each evening students returned to the cabins at Playa and through facilitated discussions shared their observations amongst each other. Joining the class was visiting artist Madelaine Corbin, ‘17, who specializes in fiber and natural dyeing. During an evening at Playa, Corbin held a natural pigment making workshop with the students, utilizing flowers, roots, and leaves to create pigments for students to use in their own art creations.

“Even on the edge of the Great Basin, color is everywhere,” said Corbin. “Using this small part of Oregon as our laboratory and studio, students got to experience color in a whole new way and apply it to their own contemplations. It was incredible to see what was created.” 

The type of creative field research produced was unique to each student, which included sketches, writing, photography, and more. Coupled with their written reflections from each day, students turned in their inventive collections of observations and site-based creations at the end of the course.  

“It is always surprising to see what was turned in,” said Myers. “Not all of our students have a background in studio art, but the way each student worked in their own passions and academic interests was inspiring.”

“What was most rewarding to see were the connections the students built with each other over the course of the week,” said Boonstra. “Andy and I really act as facilitators for our Creative Field Work courses, and without digital access students began to look at the world a little differently. Their sensory experiences take over and inform their creative process.”

Creative Desert is the second Creative Field Work course offered to undergraduate students by Myers and Boonstra. Creative Coast has taken students to Cape Perpetua each summer since 2018 for a five day site-based excursion. Creative Coast will be offered again in summer 2025 and Myers and Boonstra will take students to the desert again in the fall extension term in September, 2025.