Paul Youngquist, from the University of Colorado at Boulder, will deliver the talk, “Savage Vision: Of Maroons, Black Men and Violence” from 4:30 – 6 p.m. Thursday (April 4) in ChemSci 102.
This talk will focus on how Maroons were depicted by white colonial settlers in Jamaica in the aftermath of the Second Maroon War (1795-96) and connect these portraits to how young black men are represented in the news media today.
This talk is sponsored by the English program in the Humanities department.
The 41 North Film Festival makes a brief return to bring you this special screening of the Oscar-winning film for best documentary feature, Free Solo, on March 29th, 7:30 p.m., at the Rozsa Center for the Performing Arts. Directed by E. Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin (who was here in 2015 with Meru), Free Solo provides an in-depth look at gravity-defying climber Alex Honnold as he pursues his quest to climb the 3,000 foot high face of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park—without ropes or safety gear. Both a nail-biting thriller and an intimate portrait, Free Solo invites to us to reimagine the limits of human potential and witness the human spirit unbound. Sponsored by the Department of Humanities, Visual and Performing Arts, and the Rozsa Center for the Performing Arts. This event is free and open to the public.
On November 27th two MTU Humanities Professors delivered joint lectures on ethics, technology and engineering in Europe at the Czech Republic’s European Union sponsored Center for Ethics at the University of Pardubice. Dr. Scott Marratto‘s talk “Situated Agency: Embodiment, Subjectivity and Technology” discussed the question of subjectivity and agency in relation to the ways in which our engagment with technologies transforms our identities. Dr. Alexandra Morrison‘s talk, “Situated Ethics: New Philosophies of Technology and Engineering Practice” discussed how this new way of thinking about the role of our embodied engagement with technologies must fundamentally change the way we teach ethics to STEM students.
Scott Marratto (HU) was an invited keynote speaker at an international philosophy conference, “Phenomenology and Personal Identity,” at Charles University in Prague on Nov. 29. He was joined by three other keynote speakers: David Carr (New School for Social Research, New York), John J. Drummond (Fordham University, New York) and Claude Romano (University of Paris-Sorbonne, Paris IV).
The first RTC Colloquium for the spring semester has been rescheduled for Wednesday, 2/6, from 12-1pm in Walker 109 with talks by Nancy Achiaa Frimpong (“Skin Colour on Sale: Advertising and Postfeminism”) and Lyz Renshaw (“League of Legislation: Esports and Global Politics”).
Read the abstracts (PDF).
The RTC Committee will present the last of the Fall Colloquium Series this Wednesday, 12/05 at 1
: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.
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.
Stephanie Carpenter has published an omnibus book review in the Fall 2018 issue of The Missouri Review. Her piece, “The End of the World as We Know It: Four Novels of Climate Change,” considers new novels by Louise Erdrich, Jenni Fagan, Paul Kingsnorth and James Bradley. Carpenter will again teach Literature and the Environment (HU 3508) in Fall 2020.
Please 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.
Students from Stefka Hristova‘s Fundamentals of Digital Imaging course will be exhibiting their work at the Copper Country Community Arts Center’s “Shaft” exibit beginning Friday. The exhibit, held in the Kerredge Gallery, is a non-juried community exhibition inspired by mining in the Copper Country; the physical signs of its presence or the effect it has had on the area and its people.
The opening reception will be held on Friday, November 9 at 6 p.m. at the Arts Center. The public is invited to attend and vote on their favorite pieces. The exhibit will continue through November 30.
World War I & the Copper Country (WW1CC) will commemorate the Armistice of Nov. 11, 1918. The public will be welcomed with a bagpipe performance of “The Flowers of the Forest” and the distribution of paper poppies starting at 10:50 a.m. Sunday (Nov. 11) at the World War I Firing Trench (US-41 and MacInnes Drive).
The commemoration will begin promptly at 11 a.m. when bells will be synchronized to ring for 30 seconds. The Michigan Tech Joint Color Guard, consisting of Air Force and Army ROTC cadets, will present the colors. The program will include singing the National Anthem, a poem recitation, a prayer offering and a firing party (21-gun salute) by the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Hubbell post.
Taps will be played by a formation of local student buglers, followed by the retirement of the colors. The commemoration will conclude by inviting guests to drop their poppies into the trench as they disperse.
Refreshments will be offered in the Wads Annex preceding and following the commemoration. In the event of inclement weather, the commemoration will move into the Wads Annex. Free parking will be available in any of the Michigan Tech lots directly opposite the trench on US-41.