The Cost of Looking Closely

In this reflection, Hanlon Scholar Nica Alimzhanov '29 offers a candid and thoughtful perspective on the Hanlon Scholars Winterim Research Immersion trip of December 2025. A cornerstone of the first-year experience, the annual Winterim program brings students into direct engagement with a wide range of research fields, encouraging them to explore interdisciplinary methods, reflect on their own intellectual paths, and build community as a cohort. For the Class of 2029, the journey to Oʻahu and the Big Island of Hawaiʻi provided a particularly rich setting to examine themes of sustainability, ecology, language, culture, and geology through hands-on learning and dialogue.

In her piece, Nica grapples with the deeper complexities of conducting research in a place where land, power, history, and identity are inseparably linked. Her reflections confront the tensions between scientific inquiry and lived reality, asking what it means to learn, observe, and participate responsibly within systems shaped by colonial histories and ongoing inequities:

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Ala Wai Boat Harbor, Honolulu. Photo by Nica Alimzhanov '29

The first thing I saw upon landing on Oʻahu was not just the ocean. It was the ocean and a military warship. Then there were planes in a hangar: fighter jets, cargo planes, so many that you could not ignore them even if you tried. When we got onto the highway from the airport, one of the first road signs pointed to the nearest military base. It was built into the landscape in a way that felt both completely normalized and deeply unsettling at the same time.

In theory, I think I knew that Hawaiʻi held that kind of military presence. But knowing something abstractly and seeing it immediately, before anything else, are very different experiences. That tension stayed with me, especially because of everything we read beforehand about land, history, and the long arc of loss endured by Hawaiʻi and its people. Sitting on the plane, I remember starting to wrestle with the discomfort that arose from thinking about what it meant to willingly enter this sacred place, having learned everything I did before my arrival.

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I have spent most of my life around a very particular kind of research. Whether it was bioengineering work in high school or the biology and digestive health lab I am part of now, the problems I have worked on have existed in environments where variables can be isolated, where systems are contained, and where the consequences of mistakes are buffered from immediate impact. It is not that I thought research only existed in that form, it is just that I had never been placed in spaces where research was so visibly entangled with land, with people, with culture, and with power. Ho'okua'āina was one of the first places where that became impossible to ignore.

Many times before, I have seen packing lists that say "bring clothes that can get dirty," but none of them were as justified as they were for kalo (taro) farming. Once I stepped into the loʻi (taro patch), the mud, thick and squelching around my legs, felt both unexpectedly comforting and grounding in a very literal sense. Seeing the long-term workers covered in mud up to their necks made any hesitation I had disappear almost immediately. Before we touched the plants, we sat in a circle with Meakala Wilhelm, a Dartmouth '25 graduate who returned to her family's farm at Ho'okua'āina, founded by Dean and Michele Wilhelm, out of a commitment to cultural restoration and food sovereignty. She asked us where we came from, what our stories were, and why we were there– what we hoped to do with what we had access to.

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Hanlon Scholars covered in mud after working in the lo'i (L to R: Jack Egge, Nica Alimzhanov, Finn Cairns, Dylan Striek, Roen Peralta)

That question is not new to me. I have been asked versions of it before, in classrooms, in labs, in conversations about the future. But something about being asked it there, on land that had been cleared by hand and rebuilt with intention, made it harder to answer in the abstract.

At Ho'okua'āina, a nonprofit kalo farm on Oʻahu, the land had once been overrun with invasive species. The Wilhelm family cleared it themselves and restored traditional kalo farming practices that existed long before Western contact. As Meakala spoke, facts from our readings surfaced and refused to leave: the decline of kalo cultivation, the disproportionate health burdens faced by Native Hawaiians, and the  nutritional importance of kalo. I had read all of it before. But standing there, physically in the system those statistics described, collapsed the previously intangible knowledge into the tangible realm of experience. 

She spoke about food sovereignty, and about how Hawaiʻi does not have it, as over 90 percent of its food is imported. I thought back to my first impression of Honolulu. The skyscrapers, the malls, the military infrastructure, the sense that so much of what was visible did not feel "Hawaiian" at all. It is one thing to learn about land dispossession, about cultural erasure, about systems that replace rather than sustain. It is another to stand in a place where that transformation is still visible in what is built, what is missing, and what has to be intentionally rebuilt.

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Overlooking the taro patch (lo'i) at Ho'okuaina.

That same entanglement appeared again at the Hawaiʻi Institute of Marine Biology (HIMB), but in a way that carried a different kind of weight.

In an incredibly ironic way, I have been almost discouraged from marine biology, despite being deeply interested in cellular biology and biochemistry. Not because I do not find it fascinating, but because it is one of the few fields where science feels inseparable from grief. Conversations about rising temperatures, acidification, plastic accumulation, ecosystem collapse, and  the added layer of politics and chronic underfunding that slows or halts solutions  can make it feel as though understanding the problem far outpaces the ability to act on it.

But then there was a ceramic printer. Researchers were using it to design wave-dispersing structures that could reduce shoreline erosion while also attracting coral growth. As marine organisms colonize the structures, they grow over time, increasing protection rather than degrading. It was iterative, careful, and deeply thought through. It felt like the kind of solution that should already exist.

And indeed, when someone asked when the structures would be deployed, the answer was that they were supposed to be already. Yet after government funding cuts  stalled the project, moving forward required relocating testing after securing support from the U.S. military. With that shift came the loss of community backing and the need to restart near military bases, in a context shaped by entirely different priorities.

Later, while we were interacting with native sea urchins and sea cucumbers in the touch tanks, two massive gray military planes flew directly over the island– loud, low, and impossible to ignore. We were told that this happens constantly, despite restrictions, and that it is not something that can be afforded to be challenged. It was at that point that the military presence stopped feeling surprising and started feeling structural. It determines what marine biology research gets funded, where it happens, and how freely it can exist. 

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Military plane flying low over HIMB. Photo by Nica Alimzhanov '29.

The question stopped being whether scientists at HIMB understood how to protect reefs. It instead became: what happens when the work that is best for the land does not align with the priorities of the governments and systems funding it? What happens when preservation depends on the power structures that contribute to the very problems that researchers are trying to solve? Do researchers have the ability to create projects without compromise, and what are the creative and ethical costs when they do not?

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By the time we reached the immersion schools on the Big Island, the same underlying tension had shifted form, but it had not disappeared.

We were welcomed by the high school students with leis made from papaya leaves, and at the language immersion preschool with toddlers handing us flowers they had cut out themselves, speaking to us in ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi. Before anything else, we were honored. The ceremony carried a quiet confidence that made it difficult to think about the language as something fragile, even knowing how close it had come to disappearing.

Inside the classrooms, that same intentionality shaped everything. Hawaiian was not just taught; it was protected. English was treated as a foreign language, and when students spoke it, they wore intentionally silly hats. The moment the hats came off, they switched back to Hawaiian. Language was not just something being learned, but rather it was something being actively structured and maintained.

We later spoke with Kauanoe Kamanā, cofounder and president of Pūnana Leo and one of the central figures in Hawaiian language revitalization since the 1970s. She described how the Hawaiian language immersion schools began in the 1980s, widely dismissed as unrealistic, if not impossible. Approval processes were slow, funding was inconsistent if not nonexistent, and the need for action was immediate. So they built the system anyway. They developed curricula, created teacher certification pathways, and expanded programs before formal recognition caught up.

What stood out was not just the scale of that effort, but the clarity behind it. The goal has not shifted to this day, as they continue their efforts to expand these school systems. As she emphasized, growth only matters if it remains aligned with the original purpose. Their work is grounded in a commitment to people, to language, to culture– and that commitment continues to shape every decision that follows.

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Across all of these spaces, the same tension kept surfacing in different forms. What appears optimal from a scientific or economic standpoint does not always align with what is best for the land or for the people connected to it. Efficiency can conflict with sovereignty. Innovation can conflict with continuity. These are not theoretical conflicts. They show up in funding decisions, in access, in who gets to decide what is worth preserving and how.

As a visitor, that tension becomes impossible to ignore. Hawaiʻi depends on tourism economically, and at the same time, tourism contributes to ecological strain, cultural dilution,  and systems that continue to take from the land and Indigenous communities. That tension is not something you can step outside of while you are there. You are part of it whether you want to be or not.

That is not a comfortable realization, nor is it meant to be. There is an ease in not looking too closely, in allowing the experience to remain surface-level, in letting the beauty of a place exist without questioning the systems that sustain access to it. But that ease exists only if those conditions are ignored in the first place.

I came to Hawaiʻi already aware of these tensions, and I left realizing that awareness alone is not enough if it remains passive.

I doubt I will be able to navigate these complexities perfectly, just as I doubt I have managed to fully capture them here. But what I can do is refuse to look away from them. To sit with the contradictions long enough to understand them, even when they do not resolve cleanly. To recognize that the work worth doing will almost always exist within these tensions, not outside of them.

What stayed with me most from Hawaiʻi was not defined by discipline, but by its refusal to separate. Land, language, ecology, culture, and community were never treated as distinct categories, even when external systems of the past and present tried to divide them.

If anything I do in the future is meant to matter, then it has to be built with that same awareness– not  just of the problem I am trying to solve, but of the systems I am working within, the people affected by them, and the histories that do not disappear just because they are inconvenient.

Because meaningful change is not just about finding solutions. It is about being willing to see clearly what those solutions exist inside of, and choosing to act anyway.