Audrey Smith, a PhD candidate in Geography at the University of Florida, was awarded second place in the UF Center for African Studies‘ “Lens on Africa” Graduate Research Competition.
Her entry featured a powerful video montage of images from her Summer 2024 fieldwork in Tanzania, accompanied by a reflective narration.
The video highlighted Audrey’s interdisciplinary research and community engagement through a Fulbright-Hays project, where she collaborated on the development of a bilingual Swahili-English early childhood curriculum aimed at teaching underprivileged kids in the US about African culture through language.
Her work also included visits to community-managed forests to examine local conservation efforts, and interviews with Maasai community members about their experiences with land dispossession and the broader socio-ecological impacts of land tenure change.