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Cheryl Foster, URI professor of philosophy and political science, and Madison Jones, URI assistant professor of professional and public writing and natural resources science, say the liberal arts perspective helps researchers understand the people and communities they serve.

necessarily a product,” he says. “But we need the humanist perspective to ask: Why are we doing this? What is it going to do for humans? How is it going to affect our democracy?” Jones founded the DWELL (Digital Writing Environments, Location, and Localization) Lab at URI to advance innovative approaches to science communication. The lab considers how humans interact with places through deep mapping, which layers media and information to represent not only a place’s physical characteristics, but also its history, the lived experiences of its inhabitants, and more. One of DWELL’s project sites is North Woods, a 300-acre parcel of unmanaged forests and wetlands next to URI’s Kingston Campus. Jones’ team created an interactive experience about the relationship between URI and the land it uses. They worked with an artist from the Narragansett Indian Tribe to create a walking tour of North Woods based on a traditional Narragansett ecological story about how birds got their song.

respond to the world we’re living in is to foster interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary work,” he adds. “It can be an exhausting approach, but it’s a rewarding one, and it brings us toward more ethical and engaged work.” An Invitation to Respond The land-grant system epitomizes a fundamental contradiction. “The ‘public good’ [that land-grant] institutions purported to promote was only possible because of violence and dispossession of ancestral Indigenous land, and acknowledging this dissonance is important for true understanding,” wrote URI student Jenny Sullivan ’21, M.A. ’24, in her master’s thesis, “Origins and Consequences of Rhode Island’s Land-Grant Institutions.” Confronting this history is, according to Jones, something that “compels and invites our response.” Essential to our response are the values at the core of

“One of the most important things we can do to

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