The Michigan Tech Multiliteracies Center has started a podcast titled “The MultiMix.” Topics address issues related to literacy, writing and writing center studies. Episodes feature interviews with scholars and professionals, discussions of writing center topics and explorations into writing and genre.
Episode 1 is now available online.
Michigan Tech Humanities graduate students and professors presented scholarly work at the annual Conference of the Organization for the Study of Communication, Language, and Gender in Lake Tahoe, Nevada October 3-6, 2018.
Masters Graduate student Nancy Achiaa Frimpong presented “Skin Colour on Sale: Advertising and Postfeminism”. Doctoral Graduate student Nada Mohammad Alfieir presented “‘I Didn’t Understand Anything!’ A Muslim Mother’s Narrative Reflections on Privacy, U.S. Sex Education, and a Daughter’s Denials”. Doctoral Graduate student Sara Potter presented “Motherhood as a Jointly Constructed Narrative”. Doctoral Graduate student Modupe Yusuf presented “African Women as Symbols of Feminist Persistence”. Ph.D. candidate Toluulope Odebunmi presented “Women and Politics in West Africa: An Analysis of Feminist Criticisms Against Liberia’s Ellen HJohnson Sirleaf”. Ph.D. candidate Nancy Henaku presented “Resistance, Discursive Activism and Gender Politics in Ghanaian Social Media: A Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis” and also served as the student representative on the OSCLG Board. Ph.D. candidates Nancy Henaku and Toluuope Odebunmi presented papers on the panel, “African Women Performing Persistence: Tales of Historical and Contemporary Contributions to Global Activism”.
Professor Victoria Bergvall presented “Missing Voices in the WEIRD Discourse of Gendered Neuroscience: Transnational Feminist Discourses of Nature and Nurture in Gender/Sex/Sexuality”. Professor Patty Sotirin presented “Militarized Mother Legacies: Talking with WWI Mothers”.
Pictured from left to right: Victoria Bergvall, Toluulope Odebunmi, Sara Potter, Patty Sotirin, Nancy Henaku, Modupe Yusuf, Nada Mohammad Alfieir, and Nancy Achiaa Frimpong.
The 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.
Three faculty members and a graduate student presented on various topics related to the First World War at the Armistice & Aftermath: a World War One Symposium. The symposium is part of the commemoration of the Copper Country’s involvement in WWI. Ramon Fonkoue presented on “Art and activism in Abel Gance’s film Jaccuse: Revisiting anti-war sentiment in French art and society a century later”. Dany Jacob’s presentation was titled “’Pour la France! Pour ma famille!’: Legacies in Rouad’s Champs d’honneurs”. Laura Fiss also presented on “Recalling the trenches from Club Window: Contrasting perspectives in Dorothy Sayers and P.G. Wodehouse”. Graduate student Edzordzi Agbozo presented on “World War One & Africa: Contesting history, nation, and identity in ‘Western Togoland’”.
Rhetoric, Theory, and Culture PhD student Richard Ward has published a creative non-fiction story in Pennsylvania’s Emerging Writers: An Anthology of Nonfiction, released by Z Publishing House, 2018. Ward’s story is titled “A Rumble in the Woods”. Previously, Ward’s “Cute from a Distance” won the The Bob Hoffman Award for Creative Non-fiction and was published in York Review 21, 2015.
We are happy to announce Rhetoric, Theory and Culture PhD student Wenjing Liu is among the winners for the Doctoral Finishing Fellowship Award. Congratulations!
Finishing Fellowships provide support to PhD candidates who are close to completing their degrees. These fellowships are available through the generosity of alumni and friends of the University. They are intended to recognize outstanding PhD candidates who are in need of financial support to finish their degrees and are also contributing to the attainment of goals outlined in The Michigan Tech Plan.
Three RTC Graduate students presented papers at the 24th International Conference of the International Association for Intercultural Communication Studies, July 5-8, 2018. Hua Wang (with Junhua Wang, University of Minnesota Duluth) presented on the topic “Culture and Rhetoric: A Contrastive Analysis on the Effectiveness of Two Articles on Climate Change”. Aranya Srijongjai presentated on “Digital Rhetoric of Cosmopolitanism: A Methodological Framework” and also chaired the Communication and Technology panel of the conference. Wenjing Liu presented on “Color in China”.
The conference was on the theme “Communication and Dialogue: Integrating Global Communities”. According to organizers, “The IAICS international conference brings scholars together from around the world to share ideas, experiences and scholarly research from diverse interdisciplinary perspectives on communication across cultures.” The conference was hosted by DePaul University in Chicago, IL.
RTC PhD candidate, Tolu Odebunmi recently received a IGALA 10 USA-based Scholar Travel Grant of the National Science Foundation (NSF) in June 2018 with academic support from Dr. Victoria Bergvall. The grant was to assist her to present at the International Gender and Language (IGALA) conference at the University of Botswana in Gaborone, Botswana. The conference theme was “Gender, Language and Sexuality in Multicultural Contexts.” Odebunmi’s paper was titled “A Critical Discourse Study of ‘Sex trash talk’ in Liberian protests.” The grant was administered through the University of New Hampshire (Durham, NH, USA), and was aimed at graduate students whose abstracts have been accepted by the IGALA conference scientific committee.
RTC Master student, Nancy Achiaa Frimpong presented a paper on August 11, 2018 at the Comics Studies Society conference at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The conference theme was “Mind the Gaps! The Futures of the Field”. Frimpong presented on the topic “Ebola Virus Disease as Colored: The Case of American Online News Dissemination of Comics.” Her presentation received financial support from the Graduate Students Government Travel Grant, and the Humanities Department Travel Grant; and academic mentorship from communication and culture professor, Dr. Sue Collins.
RTC graduate, Joel Beatty, and professor Stefka Hristova have co-authored a chapter in the book, Surveillance, Race, Culture, published by Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Their chapter is titled “Articulating Race: Reading Skin Color as Taxonomy and as Numerical Data”. According to Dr. Hristova, the chapter “explores the transformation of race into biodata at the turn of the 20th century”. The book is edited by Susan Flynn, University of the Arts, London; and Antonia Mackay, Oxford Brookes University.