Humanities News, Features, and Other Updates

Author: Heather Powers

Heather Powers is a Associate Director of Digital Content in University Marketing and Communications (UMC) at Michigan Technological University. Powers is responsible for all content aspects of UMC's recruitment and reputation web properties and proactively improves and maintains quality, benchmarks, and tests to innovate key sites and pages to meet integrated marketing, brand awareness and reputation, and recruitment goals.

Clients Needed for Grant Writing Course

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Marika SeigelMarika Seigel (HU) is accepting proposals for potential client projects for Grant Writing (HU3694), offered this spring semester. For their final projects for the course, students will research and write grant proposals (or portions of grant proposals) for campus and community clients, usually nonprofit organizations.

The best grant projects for this class are small, well-defined projects that can be funded through smaller grants (typically $50,000 or less) from foundations or state government grant programs.

If you are involved with an organization that would be interested in collaborating with students to work on a grant proposal, or if you know of a potential client, contact Seigel at maseigel@mtu.edu, by Friday, Jan.17.

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Modern Languages Holiday Celebration

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Earth globes as Christmas ornamentsJoin Modern Languages faculty and students from 5 to 6 p.m. Wednesday, December 4th, in Walker 134 for a unique celebration of French, German, and Spanish holiday traditions. Appearing live will be the French Canadian group, Maple Sugar Folk, as well as Sue Ellen Kingsley and Friends.

Learn holiday songs in each language for the sing-along and listen to traditional holiday music. Play Christmas Bingo and enjoy a variety of holiday treats from different cultures. No prior language experience required. Families are welcome.

For more information, contact Karin Schlenker.

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Abigail Kuehne (CCM) Named Member of MTU Team University Innovation Fellows

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Congratulations to Abigail Kuehne (Psychology and Communication, Culture, and Media/ Applied Cognitive Science and Human Factors ’21), Sam Raber (Psychology ’22), Lindsay Sandell (Biomedical Engineering ’21), and Gary Tropp (Computer Network and System Administration ’22), who have been named University Innovation Fellows by Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (d.school). This global program trains student leaders to create new opportunities for their peers to engage with innovation, entrepreneurship, design thinking, and creativity.

Michigan Tech’s team of University Innovation Fellows support student interests, create an ecosystem for innovation, and encourage environmentally sustainable practices on campus. They aim to preserve a culture of inclusion, encourage creativity and self-authorship, and help students create lasting connections. Current UIF proposals include a university-sanctioned gap year program, updates to campus wellness opportunities, student ambassador programs, and creating a space to reduce waste and encourage students to share and reuse common school items.

University Innovation Fellowship logo

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RTC Colloquium: Orchestrated Appeals for Vegetarianism

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Emma Lozon

The next RTC Colloquium takes place from noon to 1 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 23 in the mezzanine in the Rozsa Center for the Performing Arts.

This colloquium employs Jonathan Safran Foer’s bestseller ‘Eating Animals’ as a case study to forward the rhetorical technique of “orchestrated appeals,” as a persuasive strategy for communicating vegetarianism to potentially resistant audiences.

By mapping the web of connections between food and varied life areas, rhetors can identify with values already held by audiences with diverse ideological commitments and explore alignments between existing beliefs and exigencies for change. The speakers are Oren Abeles (HU) and graduate student Emma Lozon.

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The 2019 41 North Film Festival Returns, Oct. 31–Nov. 3

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41 North Film Festival LogoThe annual 41 North Film Festival will be held Oct. 31 to Nov. 3 at the Rozsa Center for the Performing Arts. This year’s program features more than 20 films from around the world, along with music, events and special guests Anishinaabe filmmaker/producer Michelle Derosier and Michigan Tech alumnus actor/writer/producer Curtis Fortier.

This year’s highlights include:

  • Thursday, Oct. 31, 7:30 p.m.: HUMAN NATURE, which delves into the complexities of editing the human genome. Followed by a Q&A with Caryn Heldt (ChE), Paul Goetsch (BioSci) and Alexandra Morrison (HU).
  • Friday, Nov. 1, 7:30 p.m.: PICTURE CHARACTER (an Emoji Documentary). This informative and entertaining film covers everything from how emojis came into existence to how new emojis are added to the unicode system. To add to the fun, come in an emoji-inspired costume and you might win a prize. Stick around after the film for emoji cookie decorating and music in the lobby.
  • Saturday, Nov. 2, will feature a full day of programming about our relationship to the environment. Films include ANTHROPOCENE: THE HUMAN EPOCH, THE BIGGEST LITTLE FARM, HONEYLAND, and our featured presentation of Michelle Derosier and her film ANGELIQUE’S ISLE, inspired by the true story of Angelique Mott, an Anishinaabe woman who, with her husband, was abandoned by unscrupulous copper miners and left to die during the winter of 1845 on an island off of Isle Royale (today known as Mott Island).
  • Sunday, Nov. 3. Michigan Tech alumnus Curtis Fortier will be on hand to present and discuss some of his work as an actor/writer/producer. Fortier will be followed by a new docudrama about the life of information theorist Claude Shannon, THE BIT PLAYER. The festival will close Sunday evening with MAIDEN, the thrilling and emotional story of the first all-female crew to compete in the Whitbread Round-the-World Yacht Race.

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. Tickets for everyone else can be reserved at tickets.mtu.edu or by calling 7-2073. They will also be available in the Rozsa lobby prior to each film.

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Francophone Migration

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Line drawing of a city mapUnderstanding how French-speaking people migrated throughout North America from the 1600s to 1940 means tracking them at work, school and home spatially and archivally.

Michigan Technological University is a partner in the $2.4 million “Trois siècles de migrations francophones en Amérique du Nord (1640-1940) (Three centuries of migrations by French-speakers to North America)” funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Sarah Scarlett, assistant professor of history, and Don Lafrenière, associate professor of geography, in the Social Sciences department, will use the Keweenaw Time Traveler and a combination of spatial and archival datasets to focus specifically on whether French-Canadians were socially mobile as they migrated from Canada to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula during the period of 1860 to 1940.

Read the full story on Unscripted.

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RTC Alumnus, Dr. Isidore Kafui Dorpenyo, Publishes Book

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Dr. Isidore Kafui DorpenyoDr. Isidore Kafui Dorpenyo, 2016 RTC graduate, has published his first book, User Localization Strategies in the Face of Technological Breakdown: Biometric in Ghana’s Elections published by Palgrave Macmillan Press, 2019. The book is an extension of his RTC PhD dissertation work. Dr. Karla Saari Kitalong of the Humanities Department at Michigan Tech wrote the foreword to the book.

“Dorpenyo argues that the success of a technology depends on how it meets the users’ needs and the creative efforts users put into use situations.” He “identifies and advances three user localization strategies: linguistic localization, subversive localization, and user-heuristic experience localization, and considers how biometric systems can become a tool of marginalization”. – Dr. Karla Saari Kitalong

Dorpenyo is currently Assistant Professor of Professional Writing and Rhetoric at George Mason University, USA. His research focuses on election technology, international technical communication, social justice, and localization. He co-edited a special issue of Technical Communication focused on technical communication and election technologies. Dorpenyo has also published in Technical Communication Quarterly, the Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, and Community Literacy journal.

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Josh Chase Joins 2019 Bedford New Scholars Advisory Board

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Josh ChaseRTC Phd candidate Joshua Chase joins the 2019 Bedford New Scholars advisory board. According to Leah Rang, development editor at Bedford/St. Martin’s, the board advises the publishing company about

“teaching challenges they face and the research in the field that excites them. They also give us feedback on the direction of our new projects. In the process, Bedford New Scholars participants have the opportunity to connect with other graduate students from across the country and to learn a bit about how publishing works”.

She further stated in a blog post that the members of the board are nominated from among the leading programs from across the country. Josh was recommended to the board by Dr. Marika Seigel, the immediate past Director of the Composition program at Michigan Tech

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