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Clara Atwell
Portfolio
Between January and April, 2024, I redesigned Vashon HouseHold's website. I worked with board members and the organization's Executive Director to identify pain points and improve accessibility to prospective residents and donors. The intention of the new site design is to bring the organization's voice and role in the Vashon community to life.
I spent late September through mid-December of 2023 traveling through the UK, France, Spain, Portugal, and Germany, and being a geography nerd, I mapped it. This map acts of an interactive trip journal. I explore some reflections and memorable moments from each place I visited during my three month stay.
This year-long remote sensing research project aimed to provide insight into the spatial aspects of Peru's forest transition through quantifying eucalyptus and pine land cover in Taucamarca, Peru using Arc GIS Pro's integrated deep learning packages.
Between January 2021 and May 2022, I worked on a nine-person student-led research team investigating the evolutionary reasons why parents lie to their children. Our final poster was presented at the California Workshop of Evolutionary Social Sciences in May 2022.
Throughout this quarter-long project, my team worked on creating a campus map that could assist students and faculty in finding classrooms, illuminated pathways for night walking, and ADA accessible routes throughout Cal Poly's campus. Although the project had limitations, as Cal Poly did not have indoor mapping licensing through Esri, it provided valuable insights into the extent of Cal Poly's roads and paths' lack of ADA accessibility.
Dissecting traditional narratives of international development and "progress" has been a central focus of my college career. Beyond my concentration in global studies and international development, I spent three years in Cal Poly's Critical Global Engagements Club, leading the club my junior year, took outside courses in the modern/ colonial hisotry of the Middle East and Latin America and participated in Omprakash's Education through Global Engagement course in 2021. The following projects have been critical in my journey of unlearning Western notions of progress and redefining development .
My education in cultural anthropology focused on the works of queer, feminist, BIPOC, and non-Western medical scholars. These works have taught me to understand how one’s culture and global systems of power impact their lived experience. This has made me a more kind, thoughtful, and curious global citizen.
The following works are some of the most personal projects I've worked on and shared publicly. They examine grief and queerness respectively through the lens of cultural anthropology.
This project was my final for my first GIS class in Winter of 2021. In this study, I aimed to visually represent the meaning of “local food” through mapping the network between Central Coast CSA, SLO Veg, growers and customers, ultimately allowing CSA consumers to be one step closer to knowing both their farmer and their food.