BotanyNaya Jones
2020 The Anne S. Chatham Fellowship in Medicinal Botany

On the Move: African-American Medicinal Ethnobotany and the Great Migration
Naya Jones is an assistant professor of Sociology and core facultyin Global and Community Health at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a Culture of Health Leader, a program supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. A geographer, she researches African American gardens and the Great Migration—the mass migration of African Americans from the South between 1916 and 1970. For “On the Move,” Jones uses oral history and ethnobotanical and archival methods to understand how the Great Migration shaped Black medicinal plant use and gardening beyond the South. The project holds relevance for preserving botanical knowledge and for resilience in the context of global migration and climate change.
The Anne S. Chatham Fellowship in Medicinal Botany
To protect, preserve, and expand knowledge about the medicinal use of plants, thus preventing the disappearance of plants with therapeutic potential. Providing this research opportunity for botanists can, in turn, assist medical science to develop therapies that improve the quality of life of patients and develop life-saving medicines.
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