Darini Nicholas

Darini Nicholas, is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at the New School of Social Research. She has a background in Anthropology, Ecology and History. Her recent course in the Sustainable Studies Minor, Making/Faking Nature, explores the act of re-writing the story of human exceptionalism, as one of co-curation and co-habitation between humans, non-humans and the environment.

B.A., Biology, University of Louisville; M.A., Philosophy & Social Ecology, Goddard College (Vermont); Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology, The New School for Social Research.

-My dissertation project is on Vermont Cultural Politics:  A Window into America’s Culture Wars

This study explores how Vermont identity has shaped its cultural politics alongside “newcomers” particularly since the movement of Back-to-the-Landers fleeing fascism from the 1930s and Hippies into the state from the 1960s on through to the incoming waves of other groups including migrant workers to refugees right up through the election of Trump and his time in office. The so-called liberal bastion and green state of Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders serves as a useful lens through which to understand some critical aspects of America’s ongoing culture war. In addition to studying Whiteness in Vermont and the unique Vermonter identity, my research has led me to examine the state’s long tenuous story of Vermont’s recently recognized indigenous Abenaki, against whose history, the Yankee and thus “Native Vermonter” identities have no doubt become crystallized.

-A research project currently in progress with support from The Center for Critical Discard Research on New Jersey’s Greenway: A Green Corridor for the Public Good, or Another Neoliberal Development was presented at the Discard Studies Conference held in conjunction with Pratt’s Earth Action Week on the 29th of March, 2023.