2021 SFF Theme is here!

We are excited to share our 2021 Smithsonian Faculty Fellowship Theme! As you read what follows, you will see an opportunity to engage in a journey that is important and timely, one which will allow you to guide your students for the world they are facing as we move through a tie of unprecedented time of challenges.

Facing the Complex, Multiple Challenges of the 21^st Century

As the New Year’s Eve ball slowly descended from atop One Times Square at the start of this year, thousands watched from below, joined digitally by a billion more from across the globe. They bade farewell to 2019—looking forward to a bright new year, 2020.  They watched with expectation, and with hopes for a prosperous and healthy New Year.  Many economies were booming, jobs in the U.S. were increasingly plentiful, and families prepared for return to work and school, after a routine holiday break.

Far across the world, Chinese officials had already confirmed dozens of cases of a deadly and mysterious new pneumonia.  First, eastward into Europe and, then, westward towards the Americas, the virus, carried by—and within—humans, reached every continent, save one, Antarctica. Three short months later, city streets across the globe emptied, and hospital beds filled.  A one hundred-year, black swan event, the pandemic changed nearly everything about our lives– how (or even if) we work, how we shop, eat, learn, travel and socialize.  Nothing was normal; nothing felt routine.

In the early months of this global pandemic, more than 141,000 Americans have died, with a predicted tens of thousands more to follow.  Masks and social distancing are the norm, except where they are not.  Amidst the social and economic misery, some posit that the pandemic offers us lessons to the complex, interconnected challenges of the 21^st century–if only we will listen.  Climate change, structural racism, the Covid-19 pandemic, economic, environmental or political dislocations, and environmental justice catastrophes are causing monume