Social Sciences

The Connecticut Futures Lab

Connecticut Futures Lab

The Connecticut Futures Lab is an experiential learning and applied research lab that prepares and empowers WCSU students to build a more sustainable, equitable future for all in communities close to home and far away. Housed in the Department of Social Sciences, the CFL facilitates opportunities for our students to advance their skills and knowledge while strengthening the capacity of local organizations to undertake vital research.

Serving community organizations:

Organizations, particularly non-profits, are often under-resourced and unable to take on projects to assess needs, impacts, and potential areas for expansion for the work they do. Under the supervision of faculty, advanced student researchers will collaborate with partner organizations to design studies, collect data, and produce actionable analyses, policy briefs, and reports.

Serving WCSU students

Through applied research collaborations, students will take their qualitative and quantitative research skills to the next level.

  • Students will play a role in building civil society in their state, empowering them to be change-makers and innovators.
  • Internships, trainings, conferences, speaker series’, and field trips will enrich students’ experience at WCSU and provide networking and community-building opportunities.

Support the Lab

Applied Research Collaborations

Sustainable CT Danbury Team: In the Spring of 2025, 25 of our students worked with the Sustainable CT Danbury Team to plan and implement Walk With Danbury, a community engaged research event, held on Earth Day. Over 25 local residents participated, including Mayor Roberto Alves and Representative Farley Santos of the CT General Assembly. The students collected robust qualitative data from participants, as well as survey and PhotoVoice data, which the Danbury Team will use to guide sustainable planning and apply for Sustainable CT certification. 

Desegregate CT: In the Spring of 2023, 25 students collaborated with this organization to plan and implement a Walk Audit in downtown Danbury. Over 40 people participated in the walk audit, including Mayor-elect Roberto Alves and Representative Farley Santos of the CT General Assembly. Students facilitated the collection of observational data on the walkability and safety of the area, and then created a website with an interactive map to share the data and a summary report. In Fall 2023, the students extended this project by recruiting respondents for a survey created by the Danbury Department of Planning and Zoning on development in the downtown area and attending a participatory planning workshop at City Hall. The students created an interactive website to share the learnings from this community research event. 

Northwest Connecticut Arts Council: In the Spring of 2024, advanced students initiated a collaboration with NCAC to learn about the activities of the first cohort of the Empower Grant Initiative (EGI). Administered by the Connecticut Office of the Arts, the EGI aims to improve outcomes for small arts organizations through capacity building workshops and by building an inter-organizational network for accountability and mutual learning among grantees. Our expectation was that better data on the EGI program would contribute to improving equity in arts funding across the state.

If your organization has a research project in mind and would like to collaborate with the Connecticut Futures Lab, please contact Christine Hegel-Cantarella at hegelcantarellac@wcsu.edu

About Dr. Laurie Weinstein

Dr. Laurie Weinstein is Professor Emeritus at WCSU Anthropology. Although she is retired, she still teaches for the Department and handles the Permaculture Garden logistics or everything from grant-writing to managing the student interns and networking with the food pantries in the Danbury region. The Permaculture Garden was her initiative when she was Chair of the JGC. When she is not working at WCSU, she is writing her books about Native England (Between Two Rivers and Two Wars: Western New England in the 18th century with Dr. Lucianne Lavin, for U of Arizona Press) and managing a major series for the U of Arizona Press. Weinstein also started the Archaeology Program and CRM minor at WCSU and she still consults with state officers, local museums, and historical societies about regional culture history. In particular, she is active with the Institute for American Indian Studies in Washington, CT. Dr. Weinstein has a lot of pets and helps to rehab small animals up in Massachusetts where she lives.

About Dr. R. Averell Manes

Dr. R. Averell Manes earned a Ph.D. from Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. She taught comparative politics, research methodology and conflict resolution courses at WCSU for 28 years. As the founder and Director of the Conflict Resolution Project, she offered information, training and services to members of the WCSU from 1995 to 2020. Since its inception in 2008 until 2019, Dr. Manes co-founded, co-chaired and coordinated the Hancock Student Leadership Program with the Office of Academic Affairs. She served as the faculty editor of the Social Sciences Journal from 2001 to 2016. A conflict analysis and resolution specialist, she continues to work as a consultant, trainer, and intervener with non-profit organizations, government agencies, public and private schools, businesses, and private individuals. In 2021, the R. Averell Manes Gender Equity Award was created in recognition of her career of service in the fields of gender justice and conflict resolution. Currently, she is a Faculty Affiliate at the Program on the Advancement of Research on Conflict and Collaboration (PARCC) at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University.

About Dr. Christine Hegel-Cantarella

Dr. Christine Hegel holds an M.Phil. and a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She teaches courses on economic and legal anthropology, public anthropology, qualitative research methods, and the Middle East, among others. In 2017, Hegel received the CSCU Board of Regents Award for Teaching Excellence. Her current research project examines and contributes to the fight for livelihood rights for waste pickers (also called canners/informal recyclers/micro-haulers), for which she conducts field research in Brooklyn, New York and collaborates with local and global organizations. Prior collaborations have taken her to Finland to study hockey workers as part of research on Arctic economies, and she has undertaken a number of projects since 2012 focused on the intersections between design and anthropology. Her recent co-authored book, Ethnography by Design: Scenographic Experiments in Fieldwork, (2019, Routledge) with George E. Marcus and Luke Cantarella, offers a model for using design thinking and methods for ethnographic research. She has been awarded research grants from the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Fulbright Commission to conduct ethnographic research in Cairo and Port Said, Egypt, on on the use of legal fictions to reconfigure debt relations. Hegel has authored essays for the edited volumes Collaborative Anthropology Today: A Collection of Exceptions (2021, Cornell University Press) Anthropology of the Middle East and North Africa Into the New Millennium (2013, Indiana University Press) and Family Law in the Muslim World (2016, I.B. Tauris) and articles, essays, and reviews in The Anthropology of Work; Proceedings of the Participatory Design Conference; American Anthropologist; Cultural Anthropology; Anthropological Quarterly; and Law, Culture, and Humanities Journal. Her website is http://christinehegel.com/wp/

About Dr. Howell Williams

Dr. Howell Williams holds a PhD in Politics from the New School for Social Research. His doctoral dissertation, “Re-Focus on the Family: The Development of a Liberal Family Politics,” was awarded the 2017 Hannah Arendt Dissertation Award in Politics. Williams researches the relationship between families and the state in America politics from the mid-twentieth century to the present. This research combines Williams’s interest in welfare policy, political discourse, and the rights of women and LGBT people. Williams incorporates these research interests into his political science classes on a range of topics, including American government, political institutions, political theory, and gender and sexuality politics. He has fellowships from the British Library and the U.K. Higher Education Academy. His writing has appeared in PS: Politics & Political Science, American Immigration (2nd Ed.), and The Guardian, and he contributes political commentary for the BBC. His current research project is a book on family values rhetoric in the contemporary Democratic Party.

About Dr. Robert D. Whittemore

Dr. Robert D. Whittemore earned his Ph.D. at the University of California in Los Angeles. After serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer and teacher and educational director for a child development center in Massachusetts, he did ethnographic fieldwork among the Mandinka people of the Casamance region of the Republic of Senegal. He also worked in urban Los Angeles with the developmentally disabled. As an associate of the Institute for Writing & Thinking at Bard College, Whittemore, in his classes at Western, explores the relationship between writing and thought, underscoring the importance of developing the kind of ethnographic sensibility essential to global citizenship. His wife, Elizabeth, who has collaborated with him on some of his research and writing, is a poet, playwright and novelist. Their eldest daughter, Miranda, is a novelist and their youngest, Vanessa Kai, is a filmmaker.

About Jessica Anderson Schofield

Dr. Jessica Anderson Schofield earned a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Missouri in 2017 and a B.A. in Global Studies and Political Science from South Dakota State University. She specializes in the study of international relations and comparative politics. Her research focuses primarily on issues relating to international human rights and enforcement of human rights law through international courts, and she is currently working on a project examining allegations of African bias in the International Criminal Court. Dr. Schofield also conducts research on topics relating to women’s rights, political violence, and African politics. She has presented her research at numerous national and international conferences, and her work on human rights theory has been published in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Empirical International Relations Theory. 

About Dr. Manoj Misra

Dr. Manoj Misra earned a PhD in Sociology from the University of Alberta, Canada. Before joining this university, he was an Assistant Professor of Sustainable Development at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul, Republic of Korea. After the completion of his PhD, Dr. Misra was invited as a visiting research fellow at the Agrarian Alternatives cluster at Heidelberg University, Germany. His writings have won best graduate paper awards at the American Anthropological Association and the Canadian Association for the Study of International Development. He has published research articles in top-tier academic journals including in the Journal of Agrarian Change, Agriculture and Human Values, and Climate and Development. He also regularly writes in newspapers and magazines. His research interests are agrarian change and food sovereignty, energy issues and climate justice, and development dispossession in South Asia.

About Dr. Carina Bandhauer

Dr. Carina Bandhauer, Professor of Sociology, earned a Ph.D. at Binghamton University in 2001. She specializes in the sociology of racism, immigration, Latino/a/x studies, and globalization with a regional specialization in Latin America. Her research focus is on the study of racism, the anti-immigrant movement, international migration and globalization. Bandhauer is committed to teaching, researching and working to achieve social justice through awareness. Dr. Bandhauer founded Undocumented Student Services at WCSU in 2017 in conjunction with Connecticut Students for a Dream, and coordinates the UndocuAlly Task Force. In 2020 she co-founded and now co-chairs the Racial Justice Coalition. Dr. Bandhauer has ongoing partnerships with humanitarian groups in El Salvador where she has worked with rural communities since 1993. Dr. Bandhauer served as creative consultant for the production of the film, “El Pueblo Unido,” which documented her work in El Salvador and premiered at the Montreal Film Festival in 2004. Dr. Bandhauer hosts a variety of alternating speakers series on campus including a Latinx Speakers Series; an Undocumented Speakers Series; a Racial Justice Speakers series; a Transnational Families Speakers Series; and a geographically rotating International Social Sciences Symposium. Please feel free to email to find out what’s on the horizon!