Brilliant Books in Traverse City, recently interviewed Rhetoric, Theory and Culture PhD student, writer and poet Edzordzi Agbozo about his writing. Two of Agbozo’s poems appear in the spring 2018 issue of Northern Michigan’s premier literary journal, Dunes Review. See the full interview online.
RTC PhD student Sarah Potter received a top paper award and presented the paper on the panel, Top Papers in the Communication Ethics, Activism, and Social Justice Interest Group at the Central States Communication Association Conference. The paper title is “Different Rights (in)Different Times: Rendering the Invisible Visible in a Comparative Iconographic Analysis of the Women’s Suffrage Parade of 1913 and the 2017 Women’s March on Washington.” She was also a panel member for the graduate student discussion session, “When the Experts Don’t Agree: Navigating Differences in Faculty Advice.” The conference was held April 5-8, 2018 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
The 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.
This summer, I had the pleasure of going back to my hometown of Grand Rapids, MI to intern with my hometown soccer team the Grand Rapids Football Club. It all started with a Facebook post by the team. They threw out a post on their facebook page that they were looking for interns, I submitted my resume and before I knew it, I was hired by Matt Roberts, the President of the team.
The actual work of being an intern for GRFC was fairly laid-back, but I still found it to be very worthwhile and relevant to the sort of work I’m hoping to do post-graduation. During game days, I would assist fan relations in a number of ways including putting up on-field advertisements, assisting in a guest hospitality booth, ticket sales, and my personal favorite, halftime promotions. Trust me, throwing tee shirts into crowds is every bit as fun as it looks. Usually at half time, the bulk of our work is done and the interns got to watch the second half of the game before going home.
Throughout the summer, I also did several community outreach events. One in particular that I remember was during a 5k run downtown near the Van Andel Arena area. Before and after the event, I had the opportunity to talk with many runners and community members about the team, show them our schedule, and share some upcoming promotions that the soccer team announced, including a game at Fifth Third Ballpark against Detroit City FC. The interpersonal communication aspect of CCM has always been my favorite, so I thoroughly enjoyed this part of the job.
GRFC has had a men’s team for a few years now competing at the semi-pro level, but this year the club added a women’s team. While the men’s team didn’t see much success, the women’s team only lost one game all season and won the United Women’s Soccer league in their inaugural season! For my time spent with the club, I was able to hold the trophy many times throughout the night.
Being a CCM major, I’m always comforted by how open-ended the degree program was; you can do almost anything you can imagine with it. When I’m not studying, I’m the President of the Michigan Tech hockey student section, Mitch’s Misfits. Being the leader of the Misfits has been the honor of my life, so I figured why not get professionally involved in the sports world?
Michigan Tech’s Communication, Culture, and Media program has prepared me to be a #crazysmart thinker and worker. During my junior year of college I was accepted into Keweenaw Co-op’s Marketing Internship program with one other student. It has been almost a year since I’ve began my life-changing journey at The Co-op, and I am so grateful for the skills and experience I have gained while working there.
The Marketing Department is small, housing a manager and two interns, but does a huge amount of work for the store. From event planning and execution, customer service, in-store branding and promotion, social media marketing and interactivity, to graphic design, video editing, and newsletter production, this marketing internship has given me more key-word skills than could be put into a resume. Speaking of- during my internship class and with the help of my manager, I was able to create an elegantly designed resume from scratch via Adobe InDesign that showcases my most sterling qualities as well as my ability to design.
Beyond the academic and skill-centric aspects of my internship, I have had the pleasure of working with a diverse group of people of different racial, religious, ethnic, and national backgrounds. The intersection of such diversity in one store, combined with the intersection of products and companies with ethical, sustainable goals has changed my world view. Words such as fair-trade, ethical, locally-sourced, and organic have taken on new and heavy meanings. My professional, academic, and personal tool-kit has become richer from this experience.
I think that one of the biggest things about working for the Daily Mining Gazette is that it’s published in such a small town. Most of the time when I went to talk to someone for a story they recognized my last name immediately, even though some of them recognized it from the other Jaehnig working for the paper.
Internships are supposed to be about experience, resume fodder, and networking, and I got all of those writing with the Gazette. I did a lot of journalistic writing and photography experience that I didn’t have from the classroom, I have links to dozens of my articles from the Gazette on my LinkedIn, and I got to meet several local business owners and influential community members. I learned a lot, and like to think that I accomplished a lot, and however long I stay in the area and whether or not I try to get a job with the Gazette after I finish my degree, this was a very valuable experience.
Edzordzi Agbozo, Rhetoric, Theory, and Culture Ph.D. Candidate, authored, with co-author Kwame Osei-Poku, a book chapter entitled “Negotiating the Gothic in African literature: a study of Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard and Besie Head’s Maru“.
Agbozo’s work is in Memories of the Caribbean futures: Reclaiming the pre-colonial to imagine a post-colonial in the languages, literatures and cultures of the Greater Caribbean and beyond, 2017. University of Curacao and the University of Puerto Rico published the book along with editors Nicholas Faraclas, Ronald Severing, Christa Weijer, Elisabeth Echteld, Wim Rutgers, and Robert Dupey.
Congratulations!
The Department of Humanities is pleased to announce a Rhetoric, Theory and Culture Colloquium to be held on Friday, November 10. RTC student Nancy Henaku will first present her talk “Instrumentalizing empowerment: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings’ ‘Feminist’ Rhetoric” followed by RTC students Edzordzi Agbozo & Tolu Odebunmi presenting “Rhetorical ecologies in contemporary West Africa: reconsidering the ‘triglossic structure’.” Patty Sotirin will be providing commentary to the presenters.
Please join us 5 p.m. Friday, November 10 in Walker 134.
Anna K. Swartz, a graduate student in RTC (HU) presented a paper, “The Blame Frame: Representations of Mental Illness in Mainstream News Accounts of U.S. School Shootings,” at the Midwest Popular Culture Association and Midwest American Culture Association annual conference in St. Louis, Missouri on Oct. 19.
Swartz also presented a paper, “Incentivized Neglect: Privatized mental health care in prisons” at the American Society for Bioethics & Humanities Annual Meeting in Kansas City, Missouri, on Oct. 21.
The Rhetoric Theory and Culture PhD program had five graduates receiving their degrees at Michigan Tech’s Spring Commencement on Saturday April 29.
Pictured here are faculty advisors and graduates, from left to right, Jennifer Slack, Nate Carpenter, Kirsti Arko, Joel Beatty, Stefka Hristova, Vicky Bergvall, Ann Brady, Ron Strickland and Yunana Ahmed.
Also participating in the ceremony but not present for this photo was Professor Emerita Beth Flynn.
Congratulations!