Senator George J. Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions

Scientific research can often feel prescriptive, sterile and disconnected from the communities where it happens — but it doesn’t have to be. Using two case studies of watershed restoration and environmental monitoring projects in Maine, a new paper illustrates how scientists can successfully use “embodiment,” or the nuanced practices and everyday interactions that shape collaboration, […]

Researchers from the University of Maine Senator George J. Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions have found that community-university collaborations focused on local concerns can help communities make decisions and take actions to resolve them, even when complete agreement isn’t possible. In their recent essay for the journal Issues in Science and Technology, Mitchell Center Director […]

Darren Ranco, professor in Anthropology and the Mitchell Center, and chair of Native American Programs at the University of Maine, received funding from Jane’s Trust Foundation for a project to develop adaptive resilience to climate change with Wabanaki communities. The funds will be used to host two knowledge-gathering conferences with Wabanaki elders and knowledge keepers […]

Heather Leslie, professor of marine science, director of the Darling Marine Center at the University of Maine, and Mitchell Center Faculty Fellow has been named a 2022 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Fellow, one of the highest honors in the scientific community. AAAS Fellows are a group of scientists, engineers and innovators […]

News Center Maine featured the Maine Home Food Waste Challenge, which challenges Mainers to take a closer look at their habits when it comes to throwing away their food by collecting their waste and surveying how much they’re throwing away on a weekly basis. Susanne Lee, faculty fellow at the University of Maine Mitchell Center […]

In an article about a community-supported fishery called Fishadelphia in Philadelphia, Hakai Magazine noted that the organization’s founder Talia Young’s interactions with Joshua Stoll, assistant professor of marine policy and Mitchell Center Faculty Fellow at the University of Maine, helped inspire her to establish the group. Stoll previously founded a community-supported fishery in eastern North […]

Study explores ‘wicked problem’ of COVID-19’s impact on research and scholarship in higher education The COVID-19 pandemic has been a “wicked problem” for higher education, argue researchers from the University of Maine who recently published a study exploring how the first year of the pandemic affected research activities at the institution. As is often the […]

Dianne Kopec, faculty fellow at the Mitchell Center, spoke to Undark about PFAS in marine life. Kopec explained that unlike pollutants such as PCBs or DDT, which primarily accumulate within fatty tissue, or mercury, which primarily accumulates in proteins and muscle tissue, PFASs concentrations are highest in the liver, blood and kidneys, and tend to […]

Investigating how a rapidly warming Arctic will affect American lobster populations and the communities that depend on them in New England and Atlantic Canada will be the focus of a University of Maine-led study backed by a $3 million award from the National Science Foundation’s Navigating the New Arctic Program (NNA). Mitchell Center researchers involved […]

Darren Ranco and Jamie Haverkamp are guest editors for a Genealogy Special Issue on “Storying Indigenous (Life)Worlds.” The Special Issue “is to critically reflect on storytelling from, with, and for alternative (life)worlds and to create a space in which these stories can gather.” There are six papers in the special issue which includes an editorial […]