Stephanie Carpenter (HU), published “Braving the Elements,” a one-month teaching guide for Ecotone literary magazine’s new “Teach Ecotone” initiative.
Funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, the initiative helps educators adopt the magazine as a classroom text. Ecotone is an internationally-distributed magazine focused on writing and art that reimagines place.
Andrew Fiss (HU) presented at and participated in the British Academy workshop titled “Universals’ Locales: The International and Global History and Sociology of Modern Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences” Jan. 8-9, in Edinburgh, Scotland at the University of Edinburgh.
His contributions introduced historical considerations for the study of cultural representations of mathematics and mathematicians, including broader questions about how mathematicians come to agree on terms and styles.
Peitho published “The Mathmagics of Media Princesses: Informal STEM Learning, STEM Rhetorics, and Animated Children’s Movies” by Andrew Fiss (HU).
Marika 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.
Michigan Tech alumna Olivia Drake ’01, was featured in the article “Behind the Scenes of the Wesleyan Connection: Olivia Drake Talks 15 Years in Communications,” in the Wesleyan Argus.
Drake has a bachelor’s degree in scientific and technical communication, with a minor in journalism.
Laura Kasson Fiss (PHC/HU) presented a paper entitled “From Idlers to Drones: P. G. Wodehouse, Clubs, and Class” at the North American Victorian Studies Association Conference in Columbus, Ohio. S
She also participated in the inaugural NAVSA salon, singing a selection from The Mathematikado, the subject of a recent article co-authored with Andrew Fiss.
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.
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.
Dr. 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.
RTC 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
Over the summer of 2019, RTC PhD Candidate, Lyz Renshaw, participated in the Higher Education Video Game Alliance (HEVGA) Europe Games Research Summer School held in The University of Skövde, Sweden from August 21 to 23. The school was attended by PhD students and graduate students who are working in areas connected to digital games — Renshaw’s dissertation falls within this research area.
Lyz shared her experience:
The experience was great, working alongside other graduate students from schools such as University of California Irvine, Wisconsin-Stout, IT Copenhagen and Uppsala University. We had speakers from all over Scandinavia attend, including scholars from University of Skovde, Uppsala, and Gothenburg. I was given the opportunity to present a chapter of my dissertation and receive feedback from senior researchers and peers, including a graduate student who works directly with many of the scholars I base my work on.
Outside of the intended goals of the program, it was also enlightening to see how higher education is different internationally, how curriculum is designed, courses run, expectations of graduate students.
I also left the program with a collaboration project in the works, taking a previous paper I had present at the e-sports conference at UCI last year (and at an RTC colloquium last year) and pairing up with a graduate student from that university who had seen my earlier work.