Texas State University, San Marcos
AC-10: Support for Sustainability Research

Department of Agricultural Sciences
The College of Applied Arts prioritizes students' ability to engage with hands-on learning and research. Through the College, the Department of Agricultural Sciences offers several Learning Communities, opportunities for students to work directly with faculty on developing and conducting their own research projects.

Bobcat Blend is a faculty-managed, student-run and grant-supported research, and teaching-oriented waste management campus composting program at Texas State University. The goals of the organization are to teach students, faculty, and staff through daily operations and development of habits the environmental, economic, and intrinsic values of composting, in the dining halls and in the classrooms, labs, and landscapes on campus.

Bobcat Farm is the sustainable student farm that not only serves as a resource for courses across the university, but also a resource for sustainable agriculture research. Current research operations include permaculture, soil systems and hemp production for sustainable materials.

The Innovative Anthropologies Lab (InnoAnth) at Texas State University is a laboratory and network of researchers dedicated to cultural and linguistic anthropologies that take up applied, public, activist, and community-based research aimed to produce impactful and actionable insights. Being innovative isn’t just about generating new ideas but also following those ideas out into the communities that live with them to. Real impacts happen among the improvisations of social life. Thus, as innovative anthropologists, we seek to broaden and support diverse forms of doing and communicating anthropology to build iterative and collaborative relationships for ongoing responsive innovation. We support research and learning to help businesses, organizations, and communities better understand how ideas become social realities. And, we strategize better ways of engaging social improvisation as we seek social, economic, and environmental justice and improvements in our communities.

EverGreen Lab:To overcome historic barriers related to low retention and graduation rates of Hispanic students in Agriculture and STEM fields, EverGreen's goal is to increase the number of Hispanic students with advanced technical degrees at the food-water-energy intersection. To meet this goal, we will train a diverse future workforce with the leadership and cross-disciplinary skills in science, technology and innovation to solve today's complex agricultural problems - specifically those due to a changing climate, widespread food insecurity, and the lack of available water.
Hispanic students will be recruited from Palo Alto College and San Antonio College to seamlessly transition into and complete degrees at Texas State University. Forty-four Hispanic students will receive personalized support through mentorships, tutoring, and professional development, as well as financial assistance through scholarships and paid internships. Through the collective attainment of 16 associate, 16 bachelor, and 12 master of science degrees, students will be prepared to enter positions in well-paid, technical jobs in agricultural-related fields. Other EverGreen products will include the development of new laboratory facilities and curricula that will empower students to understand and build soil-free, water saving, renewable energy, and smart technology-based food systems that will be analyzed using financial modeling techniques. Hundreds of other students will benefit indirectly through a new multi-disciplinary research and teaching lab, new course modules, development of an Agriculture-STEM education pipeline, and the widespread dissemination of educational, research and experimentally-based outcomes and best practices relevant to training the diverse workforce needed to meet the food-water-energy challenges of the future.

The Center for Communication, Collaboration & Creativity (C3), a college-level center, housed in the College of Fine Arts and Communication to help faculty (1) to identify, obtain and deliver grants and (2) to foster interdisciplinary projects.

C3 is a collaborative group of scholars and artists working in interdisciplinary teams to address contemporary communication challenges and support artistic expression. C3 research and programming cuts across academic disciplines and University silos to build a sustainable culture of externally funded scholarship, creative activity and collaboration among faculty in the College of Fine Arts and Communication and beyond.

Participation by individual scholars and artists is voluntary, but all C3 projects are undertaken with a spirit of cooperation, collegiality, and a shared goal of creating novel and innovative scholarship and creative work that benefits our campus and community.

The on-campus library, Alkek, provides specific search strategies, research databases and articles, research centers and professional associations, and an individual team dedicated to assisting both academic staff and students with sustainability research.