Two Bard College Seniors Win Travel Fellowships

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON – Bard College seniors Ashley Eugley ’22 and Andy Garcia ’22 have been awarded prestigious Thomas J. Watson Fellowships, which provide for a year of travel and exploration outside the United States. Continuing its tradition of expanding the vision and developing the potential of remarkable young leaders, the Watson Foundation selected Eugley and Garcia as two of 42 students to receive this award for 2022-23. The Watson fellowship offers college graduates of unusual promise a year of independent, purposeful exploration and travel—in international settings new to them—to enhance their capacity for resourcefulness, imagination, openness, and leadership and to foster their humane and effective participation in the world community. Each Watson Fellow receives a grant of $36,000 for 12 months of travel and independent study. Over the past several years, 24 Bard seniors have received Watson fellowships.

Ashley Eugley ’22, from South Bristol, Maine, will challenge the hegemony of conventional, top-down scientific approaches by exploring community science initiatives in across four continents. She will work directly with communities and nonprofit organizations, seeking to learn how participatory science efforts diverge from the paradigmatic model and how they are leveraged to monitor change, combat environmental injustice, enhance resilience, and bolster agency. An Environmental and Urban Studies major with a focus on economics, policy, and global development, Eugley says, “Environment is everything: it is a determinant of health, happiness, and agency. Unfortunately, communities across the world lack access to clean air, potable water, and uncontaminated soil, factors that are essential to environmental security and justice. Rather than passively enabling environmental inequality to persist, communities can use participatory science to monitor hazards and leverage their findings to advocate for justice. This approach diverges from the mainstream paradigm of institutionalized science by empowering non-experts to use accessible scientific approaches to enhance their knowledge, resilience, and agency.” She will spend her Watson year in South Africa, Brazil, Australia, and Ireland.

Andy Garcia ’22, from New York City, will visually theorize, through a photographic lens, what the present and future of the African diaspora would be if colonization and slavery had not occurred. Using using their 23andMe results as an itinerary, Garcia will confront the sinister colonial history that has caused fractures and gaps in the understanding of identity in African diasporic descendants. A photography major, Garcia says, “African diasporic people have ended up in these places as a result of immigration, expatriation, and slavery. In creating a visual Afro-futurist media grounded in my lens as a person whose identity has been fractured by colonialism and slavery, I will materialize theories on the future of the African diaspora. This engagement with my ancestral history will enable me to rethink notions of identity beyond just connections to land in a global history marked by forced and coerced immigration.” They will spend their Watson year in Spain, France, Nigeria, Senegal, Egypt and, hopefully Pakistan.

A Watson Year provides fellows with an opportunity to test their aspirations and abilities through a personal project cultivated on an international scale. Watson Fellows have gone on to become leaders in their fields including CEOs of major corporations, college presidents, Emmy, Grammy and Oscar Award winners, Pulitzer Prize awardees, artists, diplomats, doctors, entrepreneurs, faculty, journalists, lawyers, politicians, researchers and inspiring influencers around the world. Following the year, they join a community of peers who provide a lifetime of support and inspiration. More than 3000 Watson Fellows have been named since the inaugural class in 1969. For more information about the Watson Fellowship, visit: https://watson.foundation.