Project Iteration II

Academic Panel Presentation

Overview

In 2023, Burning Too Close to Home was selected for The New School’s Dean’s Honor Symposium at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, an annual event highlighting outstanding student research and creative work.

The project was presented in a panel titled “Is Nature Cultural?”, which examined how environmental phenomena are shaped by social, political, and cultural forces. Within this context, Burning Too Close to Home reframes wildfire as both an ecological inevitability and a crisis intensified by human systems.

The presentation combined a decade of California wildfire data with personal testimony from the 2018 Woolsey Fire. It traced escalating fire seasons across metrics of acreage, duration, and destruction, while situating those patterns within fire suppression policy, expanding development in high-risk landscapes, infrastructure strain, and climate intensification.

View the Dean’s Honor Symposium event page:
https://event.newschool.edu/langdhs2023

Burning Too Close to Home — Panel presentation at the 2023 Dean’s Honor Symposium, “Is Nature Cultural?”

Slide Deck — 2023 Dean’s Honor Symposium panel, “Is Nature Cultural?”

Project Evolution

  • Undergraduate Thesis (2024)

    Reimagined as a multimedia book centered on the 2018 Woolsey Fire, integrating personal narrative, survivor interviews, archival research, and fire data.

    Developed and presented as an undergraduate thesis project.

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  • Expanded Manuscript (2025– )

    Ongoing revision and expansion for publication.

    Preview coming soon.

  • Data Story (2021)

    An interactive data visualization built from a decade of CAL FIRE datasets, tracking the escalating frequency and severity of California wildfires.

    Read more

  • Academic Presentation (2023)

    Presented at the 2023 Dean’s Honor Symposium, this iteration reframed wildfire through social and political context, extending the original data research into narrative synthesis.

    Read more