Building Collaborations: Working Together in a Ruptured World
In a moment marked by political polarization, global crises, institutional precarity, and uneven access to resources, research collaboration has become both more challenging and more essential. For many grant-funded teams, it is essential. This panel brings together leading scholars in current grant-funded collaborations from diverse disciplines to reflect on how collaborative research is initiated, sustained, and reimagined amid social, environmental, and institutional ruptures. Panelists will discuss the ethical, practical, and relational dimensions of working together across difference—whether across disciplines, institutions, communities, or borders—and will share strategies for building trust, navigating power dynamics, and sustaining collaboration over time. The discussion invites participants to consider collaboration not only as a means of producing knowledge, but as a practice of care, resilience, and collective responsibility in a fractured world.
Panelists:
Nick Caverly works as assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology. Nick's research examines the environmental and technological dimensions of structural inequities in the United States. Since 2022, this has included collaborating with colleagues on and off campus to steward the Holyoke Community Energy Project, a community-based, participatory research partnership that places Holyoke residents at the center of designing just, sustainable energy systems. HCEP has been supported by US EPA, MA Clean Energy Center, MA Department of Energy Resources, and other funders.
Dr. Eleni Christofa is a Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the Associate Director of the University of Massachusetts Transportation Center. Since 2022 she co-directs the RIDE REU Site, an NSF-funded multi-disciplinary program that brings undergraduate students to UMass in the summers to work on community engaged research focused on improving the transportation experience for various communities. Her expertise is in transportation operations and safety with a focus on the development of sustainable infrastructure design and management to improve person mobility, air quality, and safety. Recently, she has led several projects related to the safety impacts of bike lanes, incorporation of health impacts on project prioritization, and assessing transportation access inequities.
Laurel Smith-Doerr is professor and associate chair of sociology, and served as PI of the NSF ADVANCE-Institutional Transformation grant for advancing faculty gender equity on our campus. In addition to centering faculty equity in crisis times like COVID-19, her ADVANCE-related research focuses on intersectional equity in faculty governance and research collaboration. She is currently Co-PI with Shannon Roberts in Engineering, Shlomo Zilberstein in Computer Science, and Henry Renski in Regional Planning on an interdisciplinary NSF Future of Work grant at UMass that reimagines the future of work in trucking, with a driver-centered approach and an eye to researching how truck driving—in the face of automation and AI—can continue to be a good job that creates opportunities and access for more workers.
Malcolm Sen is Associate Professor in the Department of English at UMass Amherst. His research focuses on questions of sovereignty, migration, race, and war in the contexts of climate change and the Anthropocene. His literary archive spans global Anglophone, Indian, and Irish literatures. Sen’s monograph Irish Anthropocene: Literature, Climate Change and Sovereignty will be published by Syracuse University Press in May 2026. He is the co-editor of Postcolonial Studies and Challenges of the New Millennium (Routledge, 2016), the editor of The History of Irish Literature and the Environment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022); and co-editor of Race in Irish Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024). He has written 20 + articles on such topics in academic and public-facing journals. His essay, “Climate Wars in the Anthropocene” will shortly be published in The Routledge Handbook of Literature and the Environment (2026).
He manages the Environmental Humanities Collaborative on campus; he is the Co-PI of The Anthropocene Lab; and Co-PI of a new HFA initiative called The Art(e)Facts Project.
About the Funding (Fridays on) Thursdays Series
Grants funding can be critical to faculty careers, but difficult to pull off on your own given limited time. ISSR invites you to take part in a flexible, workshop series aimed at motivating, informing, and supporting faculty writing grants for submission.
Stop by each session for collaborative learning and work sessions that will help you stay on track for your goals, or hop in for only the sessions you need. Our registration form offers you a one-stop chance to sign up for the Funding (Fridays on) Thursdays sessions that interest you most, all semester long. An online option is also available by request.
All can self-enroll for the Funding (Fridays on) Thursdays on Canvas, where you will find a full library of helpful resources for all stages of the grant writing process. New registrants can review past materials, and seek support from ISSR for early stages of grant development.
Sessions meet on selected Thursdays from 12:00 am - 1:15 pm - with food and drinks provided in the ISSR Lab.
The Funding Fridays on Thursday series schedule
April 16 | Session 8: Community and Student-engaged Research