On November 27th two MTU Humanities Professors delivered joint lectures on ethics, technology and engineering in Europe at the Czech Republic’s European Union sponsored Center for Ethics at the University of Pardubice. Dr. Scott Marratto‘s talk “Situated Agency: Embodiment, Subjectivity and Technology” discussed the question of subjectivity and agency in relation to the ways in which our engagment with technologies transforms our identities. Dr. Alexandra Morrison‘s talk, “Situated Ethics: New Philosophies of Technology and Engineering Practice” discussed how this new way of thinking about the role of our embodied engagement with technologies must fundamentally change the way we teach ethics to STEM students.
Scott Marratto (HU) was an invited keynote speaker at an international philosophy conference, “Phenomenology and Personal Identity,” at Charles University in Prague on Nov. 29. He was joined by three other keynote speakers: David Carr (New School for Social Research, New York), John J. Drummond (Fordham University, New York) and Claude Romano (University of Paris-Sorbonne, Paris IV).
The first RTC Colloquium for the spring semester has been rescheduled for Wednesday, 2/6, from 12-1pm in Walker 109 with talks by Nancy Achiaa Frimpong (“Skin Colour on Sale: Advertising and Postfeminism”) and Lyz Renshaw (“League of Legislation: Esports and Global Politics”).
Read the abstracts (PDF).
RTC PhD candidate Shelly Galliah has published an article in The Activist History Review in which she shares her experience teaching science fiction at Michigan Tech: “Science fiction, especially on a campus so dedicated to STEM and to research, is one of the few places [art and science] may and should meet.”
In September 2018, Galliah published a review of John H. Evans’ book Recasting the Contemporary U.S. Conflict between Religion and Science (University of California Press, 2018). The review was published by Metapsychology Online Reviews.
Galliah also published in the proceedings of the 6th Iowa State Summer Symposium on Science Communication, 2018. The theme of the symposium was “Understanding the Role of Trust and Credibility in Science Communication”. Galliah’s paper, “Perceptions of Problematic Credibility in John Oliver’s “Statistically Representative Climate Change Debate”” concludes that “by taking the time to ‘read the comments,’ researchers might be able to understand how not only comedians but also other climate change communicators might strengthen the appearance of their credibility and build successful strategies to persuade oppositional audiences.”
The RTC program is excited to launch the Graduate Student Best Conference Paper Award. This award seeks to recognize and promote excellence in RTC graduate students’ research and scholarship and is made possible thanks to support from the Humanities department. All current students are eligible for the award, which comes with a $500 fund. The RTC encourages students to submit their recent papers for consideration. A student may submit only one paper per year. To apply, please follow these submission guidelines (PDF).
The RTC Committee will present the last of the Fall Colloquium Series this Wednesday, 12/05 at 1
:00 pm in Walker 109. Dr Ramon Fonkoué will present a paper entitled “The Injunction to Forget: State Engineering of Collective Memory in Postcolonial Cameroon,” adapted from a chapter in his forthcoming book on nation building in Cameroon.
This paper will address the post-colonial state’s attempts to impose a sanitized version of the history of the country’s anti-colonial struggle, the resulting lack of potent symbols for the nascent nation, and the manifestations of the people’s “dissident knowledge.”
Abstract: Upon gaining independence, the leaders of Cameroon denied the status of martyrs to the nationalists who had paid the ultimate price for their opposition to the colonizer. Deprived of this symbolic capital, the state was condemned to an improbable quest for beacons of the nascent nation. Using Michel Foucault’s concept of “discursive formation,” this presentation investigates the state’s attempts to monopolize historiography in the aftermath of Cameroon’s war of independence. In independent Cameroon, the leaders’ claim to legitimacy was undercut by the people’s “dissident knowledge” about the nation’s “silent” heroes. As a result, political discourse, which is divorced from popular memory about the past, sees its performative power undermined by the impossibility to mourn the nation’s deaths. This paper concludes on artistic expressions of defiance to sanctioned discourse on history.
This year, the 41 North Film Festival will screen five films delving into history, issues and accomplishments relating to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) innovation.
The featured films look at high school students competing for an international prize (“Science Fair”), an early Silicon Valley startup (“General Magic“), internet censorship (“The Cleaners”), the first photograph of the moon taken from space (“Earthrise”) and the first solar-powered flight around the world (“Point of No Return”). Following the showing of “Science Fair” at 7 p.m. Thursday (Nov. 1) there will be a discussion featuring a panel of STEM educators.
Documentaries can bring important context and perspective to our understanding of STEM fields and their impact on the world. The films this year tell both celebratory and cautionary tales that should be both inspiring and thought provoking. —Erin Smith, Festival Director
The festival runs Thursday through Sunday, Nov. 1–4 at the Rozsa Center for the Performing Arts. Times and information for specific films and events can be found on the festival website. As always, the festival is free and open to the public.
The Humanities Department’s Rhetoric, Theory and Culture 2014-15 Colloquium Series is pleased to welcome Gareth Williams, Professor of Spanish and Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Michigan. Professor Williams’ talk is entitled “2666, or The Novel of Force.” It will take place on Friday, April 3rd, at 5 pm, in Forestry G002 (refreshments will be available). All are welcome!
Here is the abstract for Professor Williams’ talk:
Upon the Nazi invasion of France in 1940, Simone Weil penned one of her most renowned essays dealing with the relation between force and the foundation of the city, titled “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force”. Roberto Bolaño’s 2004 novel 2666 is a fictionalized attempt to approach the murder of hundreds of working class women in and around the city of Santa Teresa (Ciudad Juárez) in the deserts of northern Mexico from the 1990s to the present. The novel also offers a sustained reflection on the double originality of the political, that is, the constitutive relation between reason and force. At the heart of the novel’s aesthetic is the questioning of the relation between war as the register and experience of the everyday and the contemporary grasped as (im)possible metaphorization, which in turn raises the question of what is possible in literature, in life, in the face of death.
Professor Williams is the author of The Other Side of the Popular: Neoliberalism and Subalternity in Latin America (2002), The Mexican Exception: Sovereignty, Police, and Democracy (2011), and numerous articles examining the relation between cultural history, literature, and political philosophy. He is one of today’s key thinkers about Latin American politics and culture.
For more information, please contact Marcelino Viero-Ramos.
Photo credit: Shaul Schwarz for The New York Times
The ninth annual Northern Lights Film Festival will feature filmmaker George Desort who will present his new film Fifty Lakes One Island and If You Build It, which Desort shot for director Patrick Creadon. We are also proud to present Joshua Oppenheimer’s remarkable documentary, The Act of Killing, as well as many other notable and award-winning independent documentary and feature films. The festival is free and open to the community. All events are in the Rosza Center for the Performing Arts.
Also screening at this year’s festival is Yoopera!, directed by MTU alum Suzanne Jurva and edited by Erin Smith. Much of Yoopera! was shot by recent CCM graduate Justin Jones with key production assistance from VPA graduate Chelsea Leighton and other Cin/Optic Enterprise team members. Visit the festival website or contact Erin Smith at ersmith@mtu.edu for more information.
Three senior scholars in composition studies are retiring from the Humanities Department this year: Elizabeth Flynn, Professor of Reading and Composition; Marilyn Cooper, Professor of Humanities; and Nancy Grimm, Professor of Humanities. Dr. Grimm retired in December 2012, while Dr. Flynn and Dr. Cooper will retire in May 2013. All three contributed in major ways to the development and success of the graduate program in Rhetoric and Technical Communication, which has graduated 88 doctoral and 139 masters students to date.
Elizabeth Flynn came to Michigan Tech in the fall of 1979 to help develop the University’s Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) Program. She was chair of the Department of Humanities when both the MS and PhD in Rhetoric and Technical Communication were developed in the late 1980s. She directed Phase II of the WAC Program, which focused on writing in the engineering curriculum and which was supported by grants from the Whirlpool Foundation (P.I., $75,000) and the National Science Foundation (Co-P.I., $175,580). As part of this project, she co-directed a national conference on writing in engineering design courses. She also directed the Liberal Arts Program and the Rhetoric and Technical Communication Program. She has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in rhetoric and composition, literary studies, and gender studies. She was president of the Women’s Caucus for the Modern Languages, and affiliate of the Modern Language Association and served on the executive committee of the Conference on College Composition and Communication twice and on executive committees of several divisions of the Modern Language Association. She serves on the board of the Copper Country Guatemala Project.
In 1981 she co-directed “Discovering Copper Country Women’s Heritage,” a week-long program sponsored by the Michigan Humanities Council, the first program in Michigan Tech’s history to focus on women’s issues. The project was selected as an “Outstanding Humanities Project” and received a Certificate of Commendation from the American Association for State and Local History in 1981.
Flynn has published six books, including the monograph Feminism Beyond Modernism (2002) and the co-edited collections Gender and Reading (1986), Reading Sites (2004) and Feminist Rhetorical Resilience (2012). The book on resilience resulted from an international conference, Feminism(s) and Rhetoric(s): Affirming Diversity, co-directed with Patty Sotirin and Ann Brady in 2005. She has also published over sixty articles and book chapters in the fields of literary studies and rhetoric and composition including two, “Gender and Reading” and “Composing as a Woman,” that have been reprinted multiple times. She has been an invited speaker at numerous conferences and has made over eighty conference presentations. She founded and edited the journal Reader and serves on the editorial boards of two international journals, Works and Days and JAC. She is working on a book tentatively titled “Rhetorical Witnessing.”
Marilyn Cooper came to the Humanities Department as an Associate Professor in 1986, just as the graduate program in Rhetoric and Technical Communication was being put in place. She was one of the early directors of the program and also worked for three years with graduate teaching assistants as they prepared to teach first-year writing. She taught graduate and undergraduate courses in composition, editing, grammar, critical theory, rhetoric, and composition studies, and directed fourteen doctoral dissertations and three masters theses. She chaired the general education subcommittee that designed the first-year seminar, Perspectives on Inquiry. She was also president of the Michigan Tech Chapter of the American Association of University Professors from 2006 to 2008, during the brief period in which Michigan Tech faculty had a bargaining unit.
For five years, she served as editor of College Composition and Communication, the flagship journal in rhetoric and composition studies, during which time she also served on the executive committee of the Conference on College Composition and Communication. She directed the National Council of Teachers of English Commission on Composition for two years, and served for two years on the NCTE Committee on Alternatives to Grading Student Writing. She was appointed as the Thomas R. Watson Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Louisville for the spring semester of 2010.
She is the co-author of Writing as Social Action (1989) and thirty-five articles, book chapters, and reviews on social approaches to writing and teaching writing, including the much cited “The Ecology of Writing” (1986). With Dennis Lynch and Diana George, former colleagues in the department, she received the Braddock Award for the best article published in College Composition and Communication in 1997. She has delivered over sixty presentations, a number of which were invited. She is now completing a book manuscript entitled The Animal Who Writes, in which she reconceives writing through the lens of complexity theory and phenomenology.
Nancy Grimm began her career at Michigan Tech in 1978 as a part-time tutor in what was then called the Language Skills Laboratory. From 1979 to 1995, she worked as an instructor and as a professional staff member, directing the Writing Center and leading it into a position of national prominence. During this time, she also served as co-editor of The Writing Center Journal and as executive secretary of the National Writing Centers Association. She was also responsible for coordinating the development of the Learning Centers at Michigan Tech, serving as an advocate for undergraduates and professionalizing the hiring practices and the coach education programs.
Upon completing a PhD in Rhetoric and Technical Communication in 1995, she accepted a tenure track position in Humanities. She was promoted to full professor in 2007.
An interdisciplinary commitment to productive diversity in staffing and programming was central to Grimm’s development of what is now the Michigan Tech Multiliteracies Center. In 2007, the Center earned the attention of Kimberly Clark for this effort and was awarded a $90,000 grant for the renovation of the Center. In the same year, the Michigan Tech Writing Center received a Program of Excellence Award from the Conference of College Composition and Communication, one of only two writing centers in the nation to have received this recognition.
Grimm has published two books and over thirty articles, book chapters, and reviews. Grimm received the outstanding scholarship award from the International Writing Centers Association in 1998 and again in 2000. She was an invited leader at two IWCA Summer Institutes and an invited keynote speaker at sixteen conferences. During her career, she delivered over fifty conference presentations. In the Rhetoric and Technical Communication program, Grimm has directed eleven dissertations and five masters theses. During her career at Tech, she taught graduate and undergraduate courses in composition, technical communication, literature, literacy studies, education, and rhetoric.