Humanities News, Features, and Other Updates

Category: Colloquium Series

Brown Bag Talk: Deconstructing Writing Pedagogy with LEGO: Exploring Methods of Engaging STEM Students Further in Writing Pedagogy Spaces with Tucker Nielsen

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What:

Abstract:

Writing centers and writing classrooms have tendencies to focus on a pure linguitic approach to teaching composition. This presentation will explore alternative methods for engaging with students of different disciplines outside of the humanities, including the use of Lego bricks to practice critical thinking, creative writing, and composing rhetoric effectively. Pulling from the concepts of metonymy and deconstruction, using Lego bricks enables students to translate familiar objects to subjects otherwise foreign or barely practiced. We will briefly examine a few exercises instructors or writing coaches can do with their students to see these principles in effect.

Who:

Presented by RTC Masters Student Tucker Nielsen

All are welcome to attend!

When:

Friday, October 6, 2023

Where:

Petersen Library, Walker Arts & Humanities Center

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Brown Bag Talk: Fetishization of Algorithms in Everyday Life with Stefka Hristova and Soonkwan Hong

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What:

Abstract:

The sheer presence of algorithms poses existential questions about how deeply computational mechanisms have come to permeate everyday life. Join the Director and Associate Director of the Institute for Policy, Ethics, and Culture in discussing biases and unintended consequences of algorithms and AI.

Who:

Presented by Associate Professor of Digital Media, and Director of IPEC Stefka Hristova, and Associate Professor of Marketing and Associate Director of IPEC Soonkwan Hong

All are welcome to attend!

When:

Friday, October 6, 2023

Where:

Petersen Library, Walker Arts & Humanities Center

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Brown Bag Talk: Disability Justice and (In)Visbility in Long Covid and ME Activism with Jennifer Nish

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What:

Abstract:

This presentation explores how chronic disease activists with Long Covid and myalgic encephalomyelitis, or ME, have mobilized embodied rhetorics in the context of a transnational crisis: the rapid rise in post-infections disease caused by COVID-19. I use (in)visibility as a conceptual framework for understanding the rhetorical and political problems that people with these post-infectious diseases face as well as the tactics with which activists respond.

Who:

Presented by Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Composition Jennifer Nish

All are welcome to attend!

When:

Friday, November 10, 2023

Where:

Petersen Library, Walker Arts & Humanities Center

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Guest Presentation: Beyond the Tenure Track: Alternative Careers & Scholarship with Angela Gibson and Janine M. Utell

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What:

Join us for a presentation via Zoom with Dr. Angela Gibson, Director of Scholarly Communication at MLA and Dr. Janine Utell, Program Manager of Professional Development at MLA (Modern Language Association) to discuss “Beyond the Tenure Track: Alternative Careers & Scholarship.” The Peterson Library will be open, so you can join there but obviously you can join from anywhere. 

 This is a great opportunity to talk with two people who navigated into fulfilling academic-adjacent careers while maintaining active connections with the academy and a research agenda. 

Who:

Presented by Angela Gibson, Director of Scholarly Communication at MLA and Janine M. Utell, Program Manger of Professional Development at MLA

All are welcome to attend!

When:

Monday, November 13, 2023

Where:

Presented via Zoom.

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Brown Bag Talk: The Self-ish Gene: Retroactive Tropes in Richard Dawkins’s Evolutionary Rhetoric with Oren Abeles

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What:

Abstract:

Building on recent developments in Lacanian rhetorical cricicism, this presentation demonstrates how contemporary evolutionary theory posits genetic determinism without a clear definition of the gene. It makes this case through close readings of Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene, the landmark text of neo-Darwinian genetics. It demonstrates how Dawkins uses metaphors to substitute a single determinate agent in place of the genome’s interactive complexity. Despite Dawkins’ admission that he could not define the gene, his metaphors give his “selfish gene” a sense of unity and coherence that allows him to describe all other levels of life (organisms, species, ecosystems) as reducible to it.

Who:

Presented by Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Composition Oren Abeles.

All are welcome to attend!

When:

Wednesday, October 13, 2023.

Where:

Petersen Library, Walker Arts & Humanities Center.

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Academic Job Market Roundtable Discussion, Humanities Brown Bag Series

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Richard Canevez, Jennifer Nish, Jason Archer, James Hammond, and Holly Hassell participated in a panel discussion on the academic job market.

What:

A panel discussion featuring new tenure-track faculty hired in 2022/2023 to discuss the academic job market within the humanities, and their individual experiences with the academic job search that led them to Michigan Tech. Featuring Jason Archer, Richard Canevez, James Hammond, Holly Hassell, and Jennifer Nish.

Who:

Recent tenure-track faculty Jason Archer, Richard Canevez, James Hammond, Holly Hassell, and Jennifer Nish.

All are welcome to attend!

When:

Friday, September 22, 2023

Where:

Petersen Library, Walker Arts & Humanities Center

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RTC Colloquium: The Injunction to Forget with Dr. Ramon Fonkoué

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The RTC Committee will present the last of the Fall Colloquium Series this Wednesday, 12/05 at 1RTC Colloquium #3:00 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. 

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RTC Colloquium: Islands of Resistance

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RTC colloquium event posterPlease join the Department of Humanities for a Rhetoric, Theory and Culture Colloquium on Wednesday, November 14 titled “Islands of Resistance.” Dana Van Kooy, associate professor of english in transnational literature and literacy theory and culture, will present “Islands of Resistance: Geography as a Configuration of Political Resistance and Atlantic History” (see abstract below). This essay draws attention to Haiti, the Caribbean, and the Atlantic as differently scaled geopolitical literary spaces that represent multiple cultures and histories of resistance.

Please join us 12 p.m. (noon) Wednesday, November 14 in Rozsa Center room 120 (choral room).

Abstract:

Islands of resistance. The phrase commonly refers to isolated pockets of organized and oppositional force. Significantly, when interpreting the phrase, the emphasis falls more on the geographical features of an island than on the refusal to comply. The geographical imagery encircles and confines resistance: limiting its effectiveness to a series of singular actions or to a small, containable  collective movement. In the cultural imaginary, the island represents a point of stasis in the midst of an immensely larger—very fluid and indomitable—natural force. However, the island’s characteristics—its isolation, its remoteness from everywhere else, and its unique ecology—also produce a synecdoche: the world is an island. What I find relevant here is how geographical markers reconfigure the politics of the phrase, both positively and negatively. 

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RTC Colloquium: A Sixth Great Lake Beneath Our Feet

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Poster for the Fall 2018 RTC ColloquiumThe Department of Humanities is pleased to announce the first Rhetoric, Theory and Culture Colloquium of the semester titled A Sixth Great Lake Beneath Our Feet. Professor M. Bartley Seigel will read poetry from his current project and will be joined by students from his graduate seminar in poetics: Edzordzi Agbozo & Xena Cortez. Seigel is the author of the poetry collection, This Is What They Say, (Typecast Publishing, 2013).

Please join us on Wednesday, October 10 at 12 p.m. (noon) in the Rozsa Center Choral Room 120.

 

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Upcoming RTC Colloquium Announced

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RTC colloquium event posterThe Department of Humanities is pleased to announce a Rhetoric, Theory and Culture Colloquium to be held on Friday, March 23. RTC student Federico Correa will first present his talk “The Ambivalence of Learning: Between the Feeling of Being at Home and the Challenges of Leaving It” followed by RTC student Laura Vidal Chiesa presenting “Women and Embodiment: Expressing through Our Bodies.” Oren Abeles will be providing commentary to the presenters.

Please join us 5 p.m. Friday, March 23 in Walker 134.

 

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