Lissy Goralnik

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Associate Professor
Department of Community Sustainability

My transdisciplinary work explores how connections to place - the sentimental, practical, psychological, and social meaning that places hold - catalyze care and responsibility for landscapes, communities, and the interplay between them. With a focus on both individual and community wellbeing, my teaching and research investigates human-nature and human-environment relationships across contexts, including urban agriculture, conservation, art-science integration, community development, and informal learning, with particular attention to building collaborative capacity across different ways of knowing. I am perennially interested in the in-between, in the liminal spaces that create opportunities for connection, meaning-making, and wonder.

My academic journey has been characterized by curiosity and a love for the natural world. I have an MFA in Creative Writing and a PhD in Fisheries and Wildlife. I also spent many years as a field naturalist and a wilderness leadership instructor. All of this work led me to a postdoctoral project investigating art-science integration in the Long-Term Ecological Research network (LTER), a collection of 26 NSF-funded sites studying place-based and cross-network environmental change over time. I continue to work with the network as the co-facilitator and evaluator for In a Time of Change, an environmental science, arts, and humanities incubator at the Bonanza Creek LTER site in Fairbanks, Alaska, where we host and study interactions between artists, writers, scientists, and place, as well as public exhibits of science-informed creative work. I also currently serve as the inaugural Associate Director for Research and Scholarship of the MSU Center for Interdisciplinary Research, Collaboration, Learning, and Engagement (CIRCLE) and have active projects related to creative placemaking, experiential learning, community engagement, natural resources restoration, contemplative practice, and interdisciplinary collaborative dynamics.

See Google Scholar or ResearchGate for a list of my publications:

Current classes:

CSUS 445: Community-Based Environmental and Sustainability Education
CSUS 801: Foundations of Community Sustanability II, Ethics and Action for Sustainability Change