Humanities News, Features, and Other Updates

L. Syd M Johnson (HU) was in Washington DC for the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities annual meeting Oct. 6-9.

She presented “Dead Wrong: Inference, Uncertainty, and Inductive Risk” in a panel session with Robert Truog (Harvard) and John Banja (Emory).

She also co-chaired the meetings of the Neuroethics Affinity Group and the Animal Bioethics Affinity Group.

Stuart Hall, one of the most prominent and influential scholars of cultural studies internationally, delivered eight foundational lectures on the theoretical history of cultural studies at the University of Illinois in 1983. After his death in 1914, Hall’s widow authorized publication of those lectures, which were recorded by Jennifer Daryl Slack (HU). 

Slack, along with Lawrence Grossberg from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, transcribed, edited and wrote an introduction to these lectures. The lectures have been published by Duke University Press under the title “Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History.”

From a family’s unique intervention into the silent world of autism to six intrepid young entrepreneurs building startups in Detroit, the 41 North Film Festival offers human stories that engage, inform, inspire and uplift.

Over the course of four days, the festival features more than 20 acclaimed films from around the world, as well as music, prizes and other special events.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind and Academy Award-winning director Roger Ross Williams will be in attendance for the screening of “Life, Animated,” the documentary based on Suskind’s best-selling memoir “Life, Animated: A Story of Sidekicks, Heroes, and Autism.”

Award-winning editor, and Michigan native, Jason Zeldes will present his directorial debut film, “Romeo Is Bleeding.”

Detroit Free Press Executive Video Producer Brian Kaufman will be joined by Rolf Peterson (SFRES) and John Vucetich (SFRES) for a panel discussion following the screening of his film “Predator/Prey: The Fight for Isle Royale Wolves“.

Among other feature films included this year are “All These Sleepless Nights,” (Marczak, 2016), “Operator” (Kibens, 2016), “Kedi” (Torun, 2016), “Do Not Resist” (Atkinson, 2016), “Death by Design” (Williams, 2016), “A Stray” (Syeed, 2016) and “Sonita” (Maghami, 2016), which won both the 2016 Sundance Audience and Grand Jury prizes for World Cinema Documentary.

Now in its 12th year, the festival continues to be free and open to the public. Major Sponsors include the Humanities department, the Visual and Performing Arts department, the Rozsa Center for the Performing Arts, Student Affairs and Advancement, Pavlis Honors College, the Visiting Women & Minority Lecturer/Scholar Series and the Parents Fund of the Michigan Tech Fund.

Learn more about the films, events, sponsors and how to reserve your ticket online. For more information email 41north@mtu.edu.

(by Erin Smith. This article originally appeared in TechToday.)

RTC PhD candidate Lindsay Hingst’s dissertation, “A Pedagogy of Witnessing: Linguistic and Visual `Frames’ of the Dark Side in the Multimodal Classroom,” focuses on the theoretical and practical benefits of implementing written, oral, and visual testimonies from traumatic history as a tool for teaching the importance of empathetic and ethical composition practices. Specifically, the dissertation provides resource material for a critical pedagogical model that supports “responsible witnessing” through short writing assignments and a final research project that analyze selected narratives, historical accounts, images, and films spanning World War II and the Vietnam War to more recent global events. HIngst hopes that her work will be of interest to teachers of composition and communication and students who wish to bring approaches to understanding and responding to human suffering and social injustice into the classroom.