L. Syd Johnson (HU) was in Chicago for the International Neuroethics Society Annual Meeting, last week. She presented a poster, “What can neuroscience contribute to the problem of neonatal pain?” co-authored with Adam Shriver (Penn).
(This article originally appeared in Tech Today.)
Mountaineer and photographer Jimmy Chin will present the opening night film at this year’s 41 North Film Festival with his award-winning film Meru. The festival runs from October 23 to the 25th in the Rozsa Center for the Performing Arts and will showcase 17 independent films from all over the world, two featured filmmakers, and an Oculus Rift exhibition. “I travel to film festivals during the year and try hard to keep up with what’s happening in independent cinema,” said festival director Erin Smith. “I pay particular attention to what the community here would be interested in, as well as to programming films that are receiving critical acclaim.”
The opening night film Meru tells a captivating story about risk, determination and friendship, following the efforts of three internationally famous climbers (Chin among them) to reach the Shark’s Fin summit of Mount Meru in the Himalayas. Smith said, “This is the biggest event we’ve ever organized for the festival.” Chin is an award-winning photographer whose work has been featured regularly in National Geographic, and his film won the 2015 Sundance Audience Award. Meru will be shown at 7:30 p.m., Friday, Oct. 23. Chin will speak after the film, answering questions and meeting with students.
Another festival highlight is a new documentary about the Taser Corporation, Killing Them Safely. With significant implications for engineering ethics and marketing, this documentary investigates how a weapon marketed as “safe” has become responsible for scores of deaths each year. The film will be shown at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 24 with director and journalist Nick Berardini present.
Smith, who is also director of the Humanities Digital Media Zone and teaches digital media and film, said the festival was started eleven years ago to help film students consider the context of film viewing and how and why films get made outside of the dominant Hollywood system. “A festival setting is a much different experience than watching a movie at home or even in a multiplex theater,” she said. As the festival has evolved, it has come to involve more of the Michigan Tech and surrounding community each year.
“I think it’s a unique opportunity for students to view films that we really don’t get access to up here,” said Daniel Grayvold, a fourth-year sound design student. “There’s something for everybody.”
On Sunday, Oct. 25, Drone will be shown at 3:30 p.m. with a panel discussion following about drone use in the military. Help Side will be shown at 6:30 p.m. A documentary premiere for recent Michigan Tech graduate and former basketball player Jillian Ritchie, it is a compelling coming-of-age story that takes on the serious subject of sexual assault.
Among some of the other films screening during the weekend are The Wanted 18, King Georges, Here Come the Videofreex, and T-Rex. Closing the festival is the uplifting and inspiring documentary Mavis! about legendary gospel and blues singer Mavis Staples.
The festival will also offer festival goers a chance to try out Oculus Rift virtual reality technology. Projects featured include Herders, which provides an immersive cinematic look into the lives of Mongolian yak herders, and Ferguson Firsthand, which recreates the location of last year’s Ferguson, Missouri shooting and allows users to encounter different perspectives on the event.
Festival sponsors include the Michigan Tech Departments of Humanities and Visual and Performing Arts, the Van Evera Distinguished Lecture Series at the Rozsa Center, Student Affairs and Advancement, the College of Sciences and Arts, Pavlis Honors College, University Marketing and Communication, Career Services, Institutional Equity and Inclusion, the Departments of Social Sciences and Computer Science, the Indigenous Issues Discussion Group, Downwind Sports, and the Continental Fire Company. “The amount of support is really great and a sign that the festival is valuable to our culture here,” said Smith. “I’m grateful for all of it.”
All events are free and open to the public. The festival website with the full schedule and program is online at http://41northfilmfest.org. For more information about the festival and its events, contact Erin Smith at ersmith@mtu.edu.
(This article by Monica Lester originally appeared in Tech Today.)
The Humanities Department’s Rhetoric, Theory and Culture 2015-16 Graduate Student Colloquium Series will be holding an event, “Visual Rhetoric in the Polis” on Friday, October 2, 2015 from 4-6 PM in Walker, Room 120A. Two of our esteemed graduate students, Thomas Adolphs and Heather Deering, will be presenting papers, respectively titled “Solidarity and the Life-World: Facebook and the Image that United the LGBTQ Marriage Equality Movement” and “The Whitewashed Eye: Le Corbusier’s Refashioning of Subjectivity.” Dr. Karla Kitalong will be offering commentary and moderating discussion. These papers both deal with questions about visual rhetoric and its political implications.
This event will inaugurate a series of colloquia in which graduate students and faculty will have opportunities to share their work in a format modeled on a typical academic conference panel. The goal here is, in part, to create opportunities for graduate students to gain experience presenting their work among peers and colleagues, but it is also hoped that this will be a venue for the sharing of scholarly work and questions across the various disciplines that make up our department. I hope that everyone will be able to attend and contribute to a lively, collegial discussion.
Light snacks and Dionysian refreshments will be provided. All are welcome.
Here are the abstracts for the papers to be presented:
“Solidarity of the Life-World: Facebook and the Image That United the LGBTQ Marriage Equality Movement”
This presentation will focus on the red and pink marriage equality logo, developed by the Human Rights Campaign’s to provide a sense of unity for the LGBTQ movement through digital space. The distribution of the logo began on March 25th, 2013, through the peer-to-peer website, Facebook. The intended symbolism of this event was, as described by the HRC, to display a sense of solidarity among the LGBTQ community and its advocates as the U.S. Supreme Court came to a decision on the case United States v. Windsor and Hollingsworth v. Perry. The response to this logo, however, could not have been predicted. Facebook saw a 120% increase in the number of profile images changed during only a twenty-four hour period, roughly 2.6 million individuals. Seemingly overnight, the red and pink logo was a cultural phenomenon, with corporate entities as diverse as Kenneth Cole and Bud Light displaying their support for the cause by replicating the logo with their own products. How and why did this viral event happen? What impact has the event had on our cultural cognition of LGBTQ rights after we “unplug” from our digital devices? By investigating the phenomenological theory of the life-world, it is the author’s intention to address such questions.
“The Whitewashed Eye: Le Corbusier’s Refashioning of Subjectivity”
In the initial stage of his architectural career, Le Corbusier promoted whitewashing as the communicative medium that could restore order and rationalism to the larger society. Through its ability to define the very lines of architecture and to erase impurities associated with expression of ethnicity and class, whitewashing was the means through which Le Corbusier desired to reform the human eye—to condition it to see that which was worthy of its gaze. This paper explores his work through Foucault’s theories of spatiality and subjectivity to address how whitewash could impact the larger society, leaving behind inscribed lines of class and racial segregation. Furthermore, through establishing this new way of seeing through the fashioned form of a rational human, Le Corbusier instituted a new subjectivity, a new inhabitant of living spaces. In an environment devoid of sensual identities, this human becomes the product of a systemic machine powered by pervasive binaries.
In celebration of French-Canadian Heritage Week in Michigan, the following events are planned:
(For further information, please click the image.)
The French director Agnès Varda will be in residence at the University of Chicago in October. We have an exciting event scheduled to celebrate her work and life.
On Wednesday, Sept. 30, Café Francais will host a look at Varda’s work in Walker 134 at 5 p.m. And, thanks to the French Embassy, Michigan Tech is one of nine universities selected to participate in a webinar with the renowned director. It will take place on Friday, October 9 at 8 pm in Walker 120A.
Michigan Tech’s Humanities Department will host an international conference, the bi-annual meeting of the American Society of Exile Studies, Friday and Saturday.
Guy Stern, former German professor and Provost of Wayne State University, will be the guest of honor. His keynote address will be at 1 p.m. on Saturday at the Great Lakes Research Center, and will focus on the “Future of Exile Studies.”
(This article originally appeared in Tech Today.)
The Michigan Tech Graduate School has announced the following Humanities graduate student award recipients:
CGS/ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award Nominee
Gary Kaunonen, PhD Graduate in Rhetoric, Theory and Culture
Doctoral Finishing Fellowship
Rebecca Frost, PhD Candidate in Rhetoric, Theory and Culture
You can find more information on the Graduate School’s Awards and Fellowships page.
Conversation Partners is an opportunity that pairs students in the Intensive English as a Second Language (IESL) program with more proficient English speaking members of the Michigan Tech community. The program is open to students, faculty and staff. Participants commit to one-hour a week of one-on-one informal conversation by signing a contract with the IESL program for one semester. The contract commits them to meet their partner in public places on campus for a minimum of one hour a week.
IESL is offering this opportunity again for the fall semester; consider giving an international student an hour of your time. It makes an enormous difference.
How the program works:
Why participate in this opportunity? As a member of the Michigan Tech community, there are many reasons why you should consider and commit to being conversation partner. Here are some of them:
The role of a Conversation Partner: As a partner your main responsibility is to offer your IESL student conversation practice. At times you may have to explain English language points but we are not asking you to be an English as a Second Language teacher. The goal is for your conversation partner to have plenty of speaking and listening practice.
The IESL program can provide ideas for your weekly meetings at the program’s preliminary meeting. Those who have participated have found the experience rewarding. We urge others to give it a try. Contact IESL with questions at iesl@mtu.edu.
(This article originally appeared in Tech Today.)
On the weekend before orientation, the Industrial Archaeology Program (SS) made a graduate-study tour to Milwaukee. Five Social Sciences faculty and five graduate students (SS and HU, both MS and PhD) investigated industrial production, adaptation to industrial decline and how urban patterns have been affected by industry, both historically and today.
The five-day trip, partly underwritten by the Chipstone Foundation of Milwaukee, included factory process tours, museum visits, and a day at Chipstone discovering explanatory and interpretive strategies for material culture, primarily using the history of the ceramics industry as the focus for the day.
Visits included the Kohler Company, which produces ceramic and cast iron bathroom fittings; Caterpillar Global Mining (formerly Bucyrus-Erie), which builds some of the largest earth-moving machinery on the planet; Harley-Davidson Powertrain Operations, where we saw engines and transmissions being assembled on a state-of-the-art assembly line; La Lune designer rustic furniture company, where small-batch artisanal woodworking is still practiced; and the Falk Foundry (Rexnord Industries) in Milwaukee, which has sadly been decommissioned in the last six months, but which offered a glimpse of active deindustrialization.
Museum visits included the Hamilton Wood Type Museum in Two Rivers (WI), the Grohmann Museum at the Milwaukee School of Engineering, which has an extensive collection of artwork depicting industrial work, and the Iron Mountain (MI) Pumping Museum. The final stop of the whirlwind tour was the Wisconsin Historical Society’s Herrling Sawmill in Greenbush (WI), a reconstructed 1850s vertical sash sawmill. The historically accurate sawmill has been reconstructed on the basis of archaeology done by Michigan Tech’s Industrial Archaeology Program in the 1990s. Sadly, the day we visited the saw blade was misaligned and a main bolt had sheared, so it was not running, but it was wonderful to see the final result of our archaeology of 20 years ago.
(This article originally appeared in Tech Today)
