‘Rising’ Exhibit Opening, Talk Oct. 10 at CSI

Reprinted from Outer Banks Voice

WANCHESE — The Coastal Studies Institute will host a temporary exhibit, “RISING,” beginning Wednesday.

The event will kick off with a 5 p.m. public reception followed at 6 p.m. with a community panel discussion as part of the “Science on the Sound” lecture series, which is held monthly to highlight research on coastal topics and issues in northeast North Carolina and features researchers, scientists, engineers, and educators from the Coastal Studies Institute and other partner institutions.

“RISING: Perspectives of Change along the North Carolina Coast” is a collaborative, multidisciplinary exhibit and research project that combines oral history and photography to address the natural, cultural, and economic consequences of change long experienced by North Carolina’s coastal communities.

The panel discussion will include members of the community as well as the exhibit’s creators, Baxter Miller and Ryan Stancil.

The exhibit and event are co-hosted by CSI and the UNC Institute for the Environment Outer Banks Field Site, or OBXFS.

OBXFS is a place-based, interdisciplinary semester program in which students are immersed in the coastal environment and community by taking a range of courses, traveling for field experiences, completing individual internships with local organizations, and working together on a Capstone research project that addresses a real-world problem.

For this year’s capstone research project, OBXFS students are working with Nags Head to examine residents’ perspectives on wastewater challenges and sea level rise, looking specifically at how these perspectives shape where and how they live.

“RISING with its amazing photographs and engaging oral histories, offers our UNC students a profoundly rooted opportunity to deepen their burgeoning connections to a place defined by change by illuminating how its inhabitants have, and continue to, perceive, experience, live with, and adapt to those changes,” Linda D’Anna, UNC faculty member with OBXFS, said.

“It is a wonderful complement to the students’ study of how changing conditions can affect individual, business, and public decisions. Getting to hear the voices of residents and see images that reflect critical changes is great for our program, but also for the larger OBX community,” she added. “We look forward to having many people come share this exceptional exhibition with us.”

RISING features dynamic photography by Hatteras Island native, Baxter Miller, oral accounts collected by Ryan Stancil and Barbara Garrity-Blake, and scientific insight developed by project team members. The combination of visual and auditory components provides a dimensional look at how change is experienced across eastern North Carolina.

The exhibit aims to confront specific aspects of changes to which local residents and communities are required to adapt—as they have for centuries—while incorporating sea level rise and the human dimension into the dialogue.

The exhibit continue through January. The RISING project is funded by the Community Collaborative Research Grant, a program of North Carolina Sea Grant, in partnership with the William R. Kenan Jr. Institute for Engineering, Technology and Science.

This panel discussion will be streamed live and the online viewing audience will be able to ask the panel questions via an online chatroom.

This story is provided courtesy of the Outer Banks Voice, a digital newspaper covering the Outer Banks. Coastal Review Online is partnering with the Voice to provide readers with more environmental and lifestyle stories of interest about our coast.