Anna K. Swartz, a graduate of Rhetoric, Theory & Culture, has published “A Feminist Bioethics Approach to Diagnostic Uncertainty” in The American Journal of Bioethics.
Anna K. Swartz, a graduate of Rhetoric, Theory & Culture, participated as an invited panelist at the 2018 Saks Institute for Mental Health Law, Policy and Ethics Spring Symposium: “Held Against My Will: Conversations About Involuntary Commitment and Forced Treatment” at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law in Los Angeles, California on April 16.
Rebecca Miner, Rhetoric, Theory, and Culture PhD graduate, was awarded the 2018 New Faculty Achievement Award by the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at the University of Central Missouri. She is a tenure-track faculty member of the English and Philosophy Department.
Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has appointed Michigan Tech alumnus Nathaniel Gbessagee ’12 as president of Grand Bassa Community College, three miles north of Buchanan on Liberia’s Atlantic coast.
Gbessagee received his PhD in rhetoric and technical communication from Michigan Tech in 2012. His dissertation research focused on improving risk communication about malaria in Liberia.
After completing his doctorate, Gbessagee returned to Liberia, where he accepted a faculty position in the Department of Arts and Sciences at Tubman University. In 2016, Gbessagee was appointed a senior aide to the chairman of Liberia’s National Elections Commission. His responsibilities as president of Grand Bassa Community College will begin in August.
Eric Michael Johnson, who graduated with a degree in Scientific and Technical Communication in 2012, was featured in an article in the Duluth News Tribune for earning a role as the drumming instructor in two episodes of the NBC drama “This Is Us” (Season 1, Episodes 13 and 14).
While at Michigan Tech, Johnson created a parody video of Al Yankovic’s “White and Nerdy” for a digital media course. In the article, Johnson recalls his time filming the video:
“It celebrates the geek, nerd culture at Michigan Tech. It is a celebration of that because I absolutely identify as a big sci-fi geek,” he said. Being in front and behind the camera in creating the video, he said “it was right around then that I really started to fall in love with the idea of filmmaking.”
On the weekend before orientation, the Industrial Archaeology Program (SS) made a graduate-study tour to Milwaukee. Five Social Sciences faculty and five graduate students (SS and HU, both MS and PhD) investigated industrial production, adaptation to industrial decline and how urban patterns have been affected by industry, both historically and today.
The five-day trip, partly underwritten by the Chipstone Foundation of Milwaukee, included factory process tours, museum visits, and a day at Chipstone discovering explanatory and interpretive strategies for material culture, primarily using the history of the ceramics industry as the focus for the day.
Visits included the Kohler Company, which produces ceramic and cast iron bathroom fittings; Caterpillar Global Mining (formerly Bucyrus-Erie), which builds some of the largest earth-moving machinery on the planet; Harley-Davidson Powertrain Operations, where we saw engines and transmissions being assembled on a state-of-the-art assembly line; La Lune designer rustic furniture company, where small-batch artisanal woodworking is still practiced; and the Falk Foundry (Rexnord Industries) in Milwaukee, which has sadly been decommissioned in the last six months, but which offered a glimpse of active deindustrialization.
Museum visits included the Hamilton Wood Type Museum in Two Rivers (WI), the Grohmann Museum at the Milwaukee School of Engineering, which has an extensive collection of artwork depicting industrial work, and the Iron Mountain (MI) Pumping Museum. The final stop of the whirlwind tour was the Wisconsin Historical Society’s Herrling Sawmill in Greenbush (WI), a reconstructed 1850s vertical sash sawmill. The historically accurate sawmill has been reconstructed on the basis of archaeology done by Michigan Tech’s Industrial Archaeology Program in the 1990s. Sadly, the day we visited the saw blade was misaligned and a main bolt had sheared, so it was not running, but it was wonderful to see the final result of our archaeology of 20 years ago.
(This article originally appeared in Tech Today)
Tech alumna Roxanne Gay is featured in a new article, “Roxane Gay: Getting Dumped on Valentine’s Day Was ‘For the Best‘” in the September issue of Elle. In the article, she describes how her life changed when she was recruited by Tech.
Twenty-first century research and scholarship is changing. At one time, researchers could only submit written manuscripts to academic journals. The journals would send copies of the text to experts in the field who would determine if the manuscripts were fit for publication (peer review). Nowadays, both the content of those manuscripts and the process for evaluating them is changing.
Cheryl Ball is a 2005 PhD alumna of MTU’s RTC graduate program, and she’s now an associate professor of digital publishing studies in the Department of English in the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences at West Virginia University.
Ball has been rethinking the process for publishing multimedia-rich scholarship. Along with Andrew Morrison, professor of interdisciplinary design and director of the Centre for Design Research at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design in Norway, Ball is co-principal investigator for a project that that will build a digital tool that will allow experts in a variety of disciplines to review, critique and edit these 21st-century manuscripts.
To support these innovations the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded West Virginia University a $1 million grant, the University’s first Mellon grant. The three-year Mellon Foundation grant will support the development of Cairn, an online, free and open-source system that will help editors of scholarly multimedia journals, books and data sets engage in building and reading multimedia-rich, peer-reviewed content.
You can learn more about the Ball’s work and the grant here.
Sean Fernstrum is a Michigan Tech Scientific & Technical Communications alumnus and the co-manager of R.W. Fernstrum & Company, a company that engineers cooling systems for the marine industry. He’s just been profiled and interviewed by Jack O’Connell of The Maritime Executive magazine. You can read the article here.