Category: News

The annual 41 North Film Festival will be held Thursday, 11/3, through Sunday, 11/6, at the Rozsa Center for the Performing Arts. The festival once again offers an exceptional opportunity for people to gather together and watch thought-provoking, entertaining, and award-winning films from around the world that explore a range of issues, ideas, and personalities. Along with over 20 films (both features and shorts), there will be special guests, educational panels, and other attractions.

The festival has something for everyone, with films that examine the progress and perils of scientific research, as well as those that shed a light on the achievements and challenges of small communities much like our own. This year’s cast of characters includes artists and art thieves, hockey players and range riders, big wave surfers and social justice warriors, as well as a beleaguered laundromat owner who finds herself plunged into the metaverse.

High school students are the focus of two films in the program: Hockeyland (Haines, 2021), which follows high school players on the Iron Range in Minnesota, and Boys State (Moss/McBaine, 2020), a timely and rollicking tale about the lessons of civic engagement at the American Legion’s annual Boys State competition in Texas.

Highlights from this year’s program include 2022 Sundance award winners All That Breathes (Sen, 2022), The Territory (Pritz, 2022), Fire of Love (Dosa, 2022), and I Didn’t See You There (Davenport, 2022). Reid Davenport, who won Sundance’s U.S. Documentary Directing Award and has cerebral palsy, provides us with a literal point of view focused on his daily encounters with ableism, along with his meditation on the legacy of the circus freak show. A panel discussion will follow on disability and being looked at without being seen.

The festival will also present several films that focus on scientific research including The Human Trial (Hepner/Mossman 2022). Lisa Hepner and Guy Mossman tell a very personal story about the patients and scientists seeking a cure for diabetes with an up-close look at research development. Fire of Love profiles French volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft and their life-long love affair with volcanoes, while All That Breathes takes us to New Delhi where two brothers attempt to save the black kite population being devastated by the city’s collapsing ecology. Michigan Tech researchers and community members will participate in Q&A sessions following these films.

Indigenous land rights and culture are taken up in several films this year, including The Territory, which provides an on-the-ground look at Uru-eu-wau-wau people’s fight against the encroaching deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. Two Michigan stories, Bad Axe (Siev, 2022), and The Sentence of Michael Thompson (Anderson/Thrash, 2022), examine social justice issues closer to home.

See the full line-up of films and events at: 41northfilmfest.org. The festival is free and open to the public. Students will need to bring their HuskyCard. No ticket is necessary for others attending the festival this year. For more information, email festival director, Erin Smith, at ersmith@mtu.edu. Major sponsorship for the festival is provided by the Department of Humanities, the Department of Visual and Performing Arts, the College of Sciences and Arts, and the Rozsa Center for the Performing Arts.

Dr. Gabriel Edzordzi Agbozo (RTC ’21) has received the 2022 CCCC Outstanding Dissertation Award in Technical Communication for “Spatial Technologies, (Geo)Epistemology, & the Global South: Addressing the Discursive Materiality of GhanaPostGPS through Technical Communication.” The Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) is a constituent organization within the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE).

Dissertations for this award are evaluated according to five criteria: originality of research, contribution the research makes to the field, methodological soundness of the approach used, awareness of the existing research in the area studied, and overall quality of the writing.

The selection committee noted: Dr. Agbozo’s dissertation is a rich study of the GhanaPost Global Position System. Agbozo makes a compelling case for how the field thus far has had a limited perspective on “technology take-up within a globalizing context,” and how, historically, researchers have engaged with global spaces in problematic ways. The committee was especially impressed with the originality of Agbozo’s research and its contributions to broadening the field’s borders and working towards developing, as Agbozo argues, a “global perspective.” Drawing from a mix of surveys, interviews, and observations, and employing decolonial and multimodal lenses of critique, Agbozo’s dissertation is methodologically rigorous, with a robust analysis that works to build new theory and innovative pedagogical practice in technical communication. The committee also appreciated the ways Agbozo’s research amplifies marginalized voices, communities, and scholarship.

Agbozo will be announced as the recipient of the CCCC Outstanding Dissertation Award in Technical Communication during the CCCC Awards Presentation on Friday, March 11, during the 2022 CCCC Annual Convention.

Dr. Agzobo is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at UNC–Wilmington.

The Department of Cognitive and Learning Sciences will host speaker Stefka Hristova (Associate Professor of Digital Media, Humanities) at the next Applied Cognitive Science and Human Factors forum. The presentation, “Emptied Faces: In Search For An Algorithmic Punctum”, will be from 2:00 to 3:00 p.m. Monday (October 11) in Meese 109 and via Zoom.

This talk explores the ways in which human faces have become reconfigured in the context of algorithmic culture. More specifically, it details the decomposition of the face in the context of big data and machine learning algorithms and its two subsequent distinct rearticulations: one linked to predictive algorithms and the other linked to the generation of deep fake portraits.

University Archivist and RTC doctoral student Lindsay Hiltunen was an invited speaker as part of the Great Michigan Read (GMR) programming series at Dearborn Public Library on Oct. 7.

Hiltunen presented a talk on the Michigan Copper Miners’ Strike of 1913-14 and the Italian Hall Disaster as part of a programming series to promote this year’s GMR book, “The Women of the Copper Country.”

Hiltunen will be sharing her presentation at several public libraries across the state as part of the GMR.