On May 8, several DCI Fellows represented the DCI at the Verna Miller Case Research and Creative Works Symposium on the Davidson campus. Since 2017 students have been presenting their research and creative works at this annual symposium, and the DCI has participated for the past five years. This year, students presented two posters at the community-based learning poster fair component of the symposium. The first poster highlighted the work of the DCI over the 2024-25 academic year, including its Deliberative Forums, D Teams, Fellows Program, and more. DCI Fellows Alyssa Henke ’26, Isabella Neri ’27, Zak Abdulahi ’27, and Fatima Mukasa ’28 did a great job introducing the poster and the DCI to a wide range of students, faculty, and staff.
Meanwhile, Luna Noguchi ’24 and Keya Zhou ’24 introduced a second poster designed to explain the purpose, process, and outputs of the Ginkgo Tree Project that they and several other students were involved in this past year. This project aimed was launched at the request of Dean of the Faculty Shelley Rigger to utilize a deliberative process to develop text introducing the Ginkgo trees that had planted on the Davidson campus between Chambers, Wall, and the library. The saplings are descendants of trees that had survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and were originally envisioned to be symbols of peace and warnings about war. Some students and alumni, however, felt that they did not adequately represent the full scale of the suffering of WWII in the Asia Pacific region, especially at the hands of the Japanese military in countries across East Asia and Southeast Asia. The DCI team hosted a deliberative forum to inform the campus community about the impact of war in the Asia Pacific and invite ideas for how signs and materials about the trees could indeed capture the range of feelings and interpretations about that period in history. You can read more about the project here, and we will be posting updates about it soon.
The DCI team had invited community input on the materials it had developed based on ideas generated during the forum it hosted, and poster at the Verna Miller Case symposium was another way they recruited additional feedback. The draft text for the signs and an accompanying website was included on the poster, and symposium attendees could read the text and submit their thoughts via a posted QR code. They could also talk with Keya and Luna about their impressions as well.
Overall, the symposium was a wonderful way for the DCI to share some of its work with the campus community. Check out more of the photos from the event below…
