Collaborative Champion: Michael Pasquier
Michael Pasquier is the director of the Center for Collaborative Knowledge at LSU,
which aims to inspire and create solutions to complex problems through convergent
collaboration. Pasquier is also an associate professor of religious studies and history
and the Jaak Seynaeve Professor of Christian Studies at LSU.
How did you develop this philosophy of working with multiple disciplines in academia?
As someone in the humanities, when I think of scientists, engineers, and policymakers and all of these types of professionals that do what I don’t do, one thing they are all really good at is being humanists. It is one thing we all have in common. We’re all interested in people. Scientists don’t dig around in the mud and wetlands just because they like playing around in the mud. They do it because they think it’s important to people. I think sometimes scientists and those in other fields don’t say that out loud enough. But I think underlying it, people are trying to do good. That’s what drives convergence and collaboration. It’s about identifying a big problem and recognizing there’s no silver bullet or one discipline that can ‘fix’ it. You’ve got to come together.
You mentioned that the BP oil spill was a catalyst for you. How did this event change you?
I’m a Louisiana boy. I grew up about 30 miles from the coast as the crow flies. But I lived in a farming town. I didn’t live on the coast or the bayou. There are three kinds of Cajuns in Louisiana—bayou Cajuns, prairie Cajuns, and river Cajuns, and the three are very different. People who live down in Lafourche Parish are different from people who live in Acadia Parish. As a child, my only encounters with the coast were when we went to Holly Beach or Grand Isle and did a little bit of fishing. I didn’t know why the bottoms of my feet were black whenever I went back home from those beaches. It was because there were tar balls all over the place. That was back in the 1980s.
I think my experience with the coast as a Louisiana native is very similar to people who live in Louisiana today. Most Louisianans don’t grow up having an intimate knowledge of the coast. We’re severed from it, yet our connectivity to it and dependence on it is so important because of the way we have engineered the river and all of the other waterways in Louisiana. We live in a water world, but we do a great job of covering it up and leveeing it up so it doesn’t touch us, until it does.
The BP spill drew my attention to Louisiana’s coast in ways that were very different from my childhood experiences. Eleven men died. The environmental impact was substantial. As I started to study the history of oil and gas in Louisiana, I also started to consider the cultural impact of land loss, land subsidence, sea level rise, the canalization of the landscape, and all of these other factors at play on Louisiana’s coast. It got me thinking broadly about the complexity of life in coastal Louisiana and the need to work with people from many scholarly perspectives to understand that complexity.
How did you apply your research tools to better understand, preserve, and appreciate the true complexity of Louisiana coastal living?
It led to a documentary called Water Like Stone, which I made with a filmmaker faculty member in the English department, Zack Godshall, with help from Louisiana Sea Grant. Then, through the LSU Coastal Sustainability Studio, I received a National Endowment for the Arts grant with architecture and landscape architecture faculty to create a mobile museum exhibit called On Land | With Water: Tracking Change in a Coastal Community.
Had it not been for these collaborations, I would have never done these activities. I didn’t go into my PhD program in religious studies thinking that I would produce documentary films and art exhibits. I was lucky to meet some really smart people at LSU who pushed me to work outside of my academic field.
This story was one of the cover features of the 2019-2020 print issue of LSU Research magazine, on the theme of convergence.
Alison Satake
LSU Media Relations
225-578-3870
asatake@lsu.edu
Elsa Hahne
LSU Office of Research & Economic Development
225-578-4774
ehahne@lsu.edu