The 2022 recipient of the ACUA & RECON Offshore DEI Award is Stephanie Sterling, East Carolina University. Stephanie is a second-year graduate student in the Program for Maritime Studies at East Carolina University. Her thesis investigates geographic and cognitive boundaries of freedom and confinement within the rice plantations of Brunswick County, North Carolina from the perspective of enslaved and descendant Gullah Geechee Africans. Her interests and methods include Black Geographies, coastal communities, resource management, remote sensing, and photogrammetry. Whenever possible, Sterling takes a community-driven approach to projects and believes that public outreach should not be considered a by-product or an obligation to the research conducted, but rather, fundamental to the research design itself.
