Author: Ashley Melzer (Page 1 of 2)

During  What Now? the 2021 HPG Symposium, we charged three artists to collaborate with grad students to create new works based on their original scholarship. The artist/scholar pairs met for two months ahead of the symposium and then debuted their work to a live audience. Read about each of our contributors and see their art below.

 

Aunt Molly Jackson

Iris Gottlieb is an illustrator and author best known for using art to demystify complexities of history, science, sociology, and her own experience. Passionate about race and gender equity in classical music, Elias Gross comes to UNC with a background in arts administration, music education, and viola performance. Gross is currently studying the life and music of Aunt Molly Jackson, a feminist icon and folk hero, on which Iris’s illustration is based. 

Solastalgia

Kamara Thomas is a singer, songspeller, mythology fanatic, and multidisciplinary storyteller based in Durham, NC. Deanna Corrin is a PhD student in Geography studying feminist political geography, health geography, political ecology, and wildfires. The music and visuals Kamara devised bring Deanna’s work on the devastation of the Paradise wildfire into perspective, capturing the concept of solastalgia: emotional distress from environmental change. 

 

Nervous Endings

Jessica Q. Stark is a mixed-race poet and scholar that lives in Jacksonville, Florida. Jacob Griffin  is a PhD student in Anthropology on the Biology, Ecology, and Evolution Track. He studies the deterioration of physiological functions associated with advancing age due to inflammation dysregulation. The poem and accompanying art Jessica created beautifully folds Jacobs research into her own creative work about the body and her mother’s life. Read it below.

 

Nervous Endings

Eros is everywhere. It is what binds.

—John Updyke 

She’s young in age but knows her sage
She knows a page or two from the book of the luck

—Princess Nokia

Like a probable god, I am

the archetype of a shape

small desires at the end

of my arms and nose

of houses and undone 

hours against bone

This is a memory test. I am going to read a list of words 

that you will have to remember now and later on. Listen carefully. 

When I am through, tell me as many words as you can remember. 

It doesn’t matter in what order you say them.

Village-Love-Body-Airplane-War-Sacrifice-Ocean-Food-Family

What happens against 

a body occupied

a clock’s antidote to

a gone-village, gone

home for dispersion—

an absence, a little 

string laid out 

on life’s plank

on the phone

my mother worries

about her death, what

time it will be

who will care

who will take

she drinks

green tea against life’s

petty inflammations

childhood of rice

childhood of smallpox

of dirty water

and dead brothers—

her mother’s infection

impressing upon the

fabric of her body

like loose thread

I’m older now, she says

a little incantation as 

permission to stay

stone-still against 

memory’s stable—

the food between us

that she lets rot

I am going to read the same list for a second time. 

Try to remember and tell me as many words as you can, 

including words you said the first time.

Family-Sacrifice-Love-Village-Airplane-Ocean-Food-Body-War

What of a village?

My mother left

an airplane 

and returned twenty

years later to a hole in

her body, my body

like a net of 

decisions unmade

you can resist death,

but you can’t refuse

water—can’t garbage

a little white lie

she says the first time

she saw the ocean

she was up so high

moving away 

from every

known word

through blue sky

she moves slower

now and dyes her hair

weekly against

love’s firmament

what is an age,

but accumulation,

but a finite template

for life’s choices—

to move, 

to be still,

to love plainly, 

or to survive

I will ask you to recall those words again at the end of the test.

Airplane-Food-Village-Sacrifice-Family-Love-Body-War- 

Ocean 

Ocean 

Ocean

 

– – –

Notes:
This poem was written in collaboration with Jacob Griffin’s research on inflammation, pathogen exposure, physical activity and aging from his dissertation, “The Role of Adiposity Induced Inflammation in Biological Aging.”

The questionnaire language is extracted from the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) Administration and Scoring Instructions.

Annotated illustrations are woodcut excerpts from “De Humani Corporis Fabrica Libri Septem” (“On the fabric of the human body in seven books”) written by Andreas Vesalius and published by Johannes Oporinus in May 1543. One of the earliest accounts of anatomical illustrations, these woodcuts were recompiled as a “six-series” side-by-side by Harvey Cushing in “A Bio-Bibliography of Andreas Vesalius” (1943).

Humanities for the Public Good is proud to announce eight new Critical Issues Project Fund award winners. Chosen from a competitive pool of applications, these projects represent powerful collaborations between UNC scholars and nearby communities.  

This year’s projects share a focus on the theme of “Belonging, ” engaging with the ways people, ideas, and/or spaces welcome or exclude. Their embrace of social justice and art feel particularly relevant to this historic moment. We look forward to watching their growth and impact over the coming year.

Learn more about the projects:

• Dialogue and Transformation: Bringing Philosophy to Juvenile Justice Centers in North Carolina – Led by Director of Outreach in the Philosophy Department, Michael Vazquez, this project will integrate philosophy and university resources in Juvenile Justice education programs. The first pilot program will be a weekly philosophy discussion group centering on Plato’s Republic for students housed at Cabarrus Youth Development Center in Concord, NC.
• Remembering the Dead, Honoring the Living: The Barbee Cemetery Remembrance Project – An oral history and community remembrance project from the Southern Oral History Program and the Chapel-Hill Carrboro NAACP centered around the unrecognized Barbee Cemetery in the Meadowmont neighborhood in Chapel Hill.
• Warren County 1921 Project – A public reenactment and engagement project around the 1921 trial of the Norlina 16, a group of Black men imprisoned after battling an armed white mob that was intent on terrorizing Norlina’s Black community in Warren County. This program is a project of American Studies professor Glenn Hinson, Warren County’s 1921 Project, that county’s SPARK (Seeking Peace and Reconciling Kinship) racial justice coalition, the Warren County NAACP, the Warren County African American History Collective, and UNC’s Institute for African American Research.
• Race and the Regency – A special six-month web series produced by the Jane Austen Summer Program featuring Q&As, lectures by scholars, and engaged practices with the Jane Austen fandom to explore the role of race in the novels and the author’s legacy.
• Southern Cultures’ The Abolitionist South – An expansion on the themes and resources of the Southern Cultures Journal’s upcoming Abolitionist South Fall 2020 Issue (special guest edited by Garrett Felber and Dionne Bailey). This project will include an extended print-run of issues for incarcerated individuals, a series of public programs and a one credit course for grad students themed on modern abolition movements.
• Process Series Storytelling Festival – Recognizing the power and potential of storytelling in its many forms at this pivotal moment in American culture and politics, the Process Series in partnership with UNC’s Department of American Studies will present a Storytelling Festival February 17-21 2021. Featuring performances and workshops features thirteen Native American, African American, Asian American, Latinx and European American Storytellers.
• A Good Boy –  A music theater piece in progress with music by AJ Layague and Marc Callahan (Assistant Professor of Music) with texts by Lynden Harris (Hidden Voices)—all in collaboration with stage director Kathy Hunter Williams (Dept. of Drama). The libretto draws on Harris’s interviews with the mothers, sisters, and children of men living on Death Row–men with whom the creative team has formed relationships over the years. 
• Pickin’ for Progress – A documentary and community project focused on immigrant laborers on North Carolina farms, their struggle, the union organizers fighting against their exploitation, and the inspiring folk music that has long been the soul of the movement. This is a project of Chair of Music Professor David Garcia, musician Joe Troop, filmmaker Rode Diaz (Iximche Media), organizer Emily Rhyne (Witness for Peace),  Institute for the Study of the Americas Associate Director Hannah Gill, and producers and documentarians Anthony Simpkins and Tim Duggan of GemsOnVHS.

Read about all the projects that have received Critical Issues support thus far. 

The following essay was written by John Bechtold, a doctoral student in American Studies and HPG Humanities Professional Pathway Fellow (Summer 2020) during a course on public writing taught by Kelly Alexander. Endeavors , the UNC Research online magazine, did a feature on John last year, which you can read here. 

– – – – – – – – – – – –

The line worried me. It was long and snaked around the walled perimeter of the Governor’s office in Baqubah, Iraq. People were gathered in the line to ask for help, some wanted money, some wanted a job, others wanted to ask the Governor to intervene in land disputes. It was 2004, a time of possibility in Iraq when lives could be reclaimed and property could be restored, yet before the relentless violence that would enflame sectarianism and birth the Islamic state.

The line worried me because it was both an easy target for a suicide bomber or else a convenient place to hide a suicide bomber. Both possibilities would produce the same result: more dead bodies. It was my job to protect the Governor’s office, and I didn’t want one of those dead bodies to be someone I knew. And for this reason, I began sending soldiers outside of the compound every morning to shoo people away before the line could form. One morning I was called to the front gate because an old man needed help.

I’m not sure what I expected when I arrived at the gate. But when I did arrive, I found an old man with a frost-white beard cradling a small boy in his arms. Two gauze patches were taped over the boy’s eyes. I learned through an interpreter that this boy, the man’s grandson, was hit in the face with dirt and debris scattered by an explosion. As the old man explained, the boy was playing by the roadside near his home when an IED exploded. It had been four days since his world went dark, and the old man wanted ten dollars for taxi fare to see an eye surgeon in Baghdad. We offered to replace the bandages covering the boy’s damaged eyes. His cheeks were flecked with dried blood, and when our medic tried to pull the bandages off, the gauze stuck to his face. We couldn’t help him without hurting him. So, we sent them away with cab fare.

That was more than fifteen years ago, and I never found out what happened to that boy. I can only imagine how one day playing by the roadside, interrupted by a bang, blast, and flying debris, shaped his life in Iraq since then. What I do know is that his life and others like it – and there are many, many more like it, both past and present, that span the continuum of America’s wars from the Philippines in 1900 to Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan – are not visible in the way war is remembered in America on Veterans Day. Public memory is centered on our own soldiers. In other words, the boy is competing with me in this commemorative frame, and he doesn’t have a chance.

The boy competes with me as I sneak up to my children after time away for a surprise homecoming with the cameras rolling for a television audience. The boy competes with me in shows like SEAL Team as I heroically defend America from its fictional foes in Asia yet remain misunderstood at home. He competes with me as my image is paraded across television screens to sell everything from Jeeps to American football. He competes with me as my virtual body is guided over the pixelated terrain of battles past by teenagers playing online military simulation games like Squad. He competes with me in films like American Sniper, where somewhere in the Al-Anbar province of Iraq my sniper self in the form of Bradley Cooper is forced to navigate the rehashed shoot-or-don’t-shoot quandary to protect an American patrol. In that film, the boy appears with a grenade. He steps into the street to attack the patrol and in so doing into the public domain as an agent of violence. He’s literally in the crosshairs now, and he’s outgunned. I’m the hero in this configuration – the one who kills the boy to preserve American lives.

And when the conversation shifts to my sacrifice on Veterans Day, trauma enters the conversation as a sacrificial wound. This move pushes the boy out of the story all together. To compete with me, he must compete with my wounds, the trauma of killing, the shoot-or-don’t-shoot injury, however real or imagined. The cultural representation of war is a narrow space. There’s only room for one sacrificial victim, and it’s always me. As for the boy, he’s not only outgunned, he’s outmaneuvered by a community conditioned to watch the parade with star-spangled eyes from lines formed along city streets.

About the Author

John Bechtold is a retired combat veteran and recent graduate of Duke University. He has begun to cultivate a growing passion in documentary storytelling and has just completed a multi-media documentary project that tells the stories of how our wounded veterans are reclaiming their lives after their experience in war. John is particularly interested in the lived experience of people affected by political violence. When he isn’t taking pictures on a street somewhere in the world, John can be found at home cooking tasty food or trying to stand on his head in yoga class (it’s not working).

www.johnbechtold.me

Humanities for the Public Good Initiative Communications Specialists

APPLY HERE

The Humanities for the Public Good Initiative (HPG) implements mini-granting, curricular, and fellowship programs to enhance the culture of humanities engagement on UNC’s campus. HPG seeks two graduate students for communications assistance. Position pays $25/hour; the hours will vary somewhatbut will likely average ~5/week.

The HPG newsletter is run on Campaign Monitor. Familiarity with it, as well as WordPress and Google spreadsheets, or capacity to quickly become familiar, is helpful. Successful applicants will have a once-weekly meeting with HPG Initiative director; otherwise, hours and work locations are flexible.

The work:

1. Compile, write, and format monthly newsletter from template with materials supplied by HPG Initiative Director, including maintainenance newsletter subscription lists
2. Devise standards and solicit entries for HPG blog
3. Keep HPG website up-to-date

The right candidate(s) will be reliable, have great diction and a strong sense of the interesting, and an interest in (and interest in deepening understanding of) the public humanities. To apply, please use this web form to upload a short cover letter (no more than one page) and C.V. or resume.

See the registration page & form to propose breakout sessions for Saturday – forms no longer active

 

The Sympoisum

The Humanities for the Public Good Initiative brought together students, artists, scholars, cultural practitioners, and people interested in using humanistic knowledge to forward publicly engaged scholarship, for two days of events on Friday, May 3rd & Saturday, May 4th, 2019. All events were free, and unless otherwise designated on the registration form, open to the public. More on the conference theme and the “unconference” break out sessions below.

Schedule of Events

	Friday, May 3rd
	Before Lunch: Graduate Summit
8:30 a.m.-10 a.m. Pleasants Family Room, Wilson Library	Engaged Grad Breakfast Forum: Talking Mentorship, Project Support, Career Pathways Robyn Schroeder, Humanities for the Public Good Rachel Schaevitz, Carolina Public Humanities	A breakfast discussion connecting engaged humanities graduate students & strategizing about HPG investing in grad priorities
10 a.m. Pleasants Family Room, Wilson Library	Meaning-Making for Engaged Graduate Students Mini-Workshop Maria Erb, Diversity & Student Success, Graduate School	An opportunity for graduate students with public scholarship goals to reflect on their social impact priorities and how they are or aren’t connected to graduate study
11 a.m. Pleasants Family Room, Wilson Library	Doing the Dissertation Differently: Resources, Evaluation, & Graduate Lightning Talks Charlotte Fryar, American Studies Sarah George-Waterfield, English & Comparative Literature Grant Glass, English & Comparative Literature Kimber Thomas, American Studies Helen Orr, Religious Studies Facilitators: Philip Hollingsworth, Institute for the Arts & Humanities; Dwayne Dixon, Department of Asian Studies	Examples of new, innovative humanities and social science dissertations on campus, with reflections on the available and needed practical and intellectual resources for supporting them
12:30 p.m. Lunch, Carolina Inn	Mentoring Graduate Students for Professional Success Beyond the Tenure Track Facilitators: Rachel Schaevitz, Carolina Public Humanities; Robyn Schroeder, Humanities for the Public Good	A lunch conversation, in breakout groups, between grads, faculty, and staff about challenges and needs in mentoring grad students for professional success (as grads’ themselves define it).
	After Lunch: Campus Summit
1:30 p.m. (Panel A) Donovan Lounge, Greenlaw Hall	HPG Engaged Project Spotlight Stories to Save Lives (Sara Wood & Rev. William Kearney) Migration Stories: Linguistics & Belonging Among Refugees from Burma (Becky Butler, Jennifer Boehm, and Amy Reynolds) National High School Ethics Bowl (Steve Swartzer) UndocuCarolina (Rubi Franco Quiroz, Ricky Hurtado, and Barbara Sostaita) Facilitator: Daniel Fisher (National Humanities Alliance)	Reflections on the first round of “Migration & Mobility” community collaborative projects funded by the Humanities for the Public Good Initiative.
1:30 p.m. (Panel B) Pleasants Family Room, Wilson Library	Digital Public Humanities Roundtable ArtBot (Elizabeth Manekin & Kristen Foote) Red Record/Carolina K-12 Teacher’s Development Institute on Difficult History (Seth Kotch, Christie Norris) Digital Portobelo (Renee Alexander Craft) Facilitator: Dan Anderson, Digital Innovation Lab	Reflections on the sustainability, outreach, and programmatic challenges and possibilities and the intersections of digital and public humanities.
3 p.m. (Panel C) Incubator Room, Hyde Hall, Institute for the Arts & Humanities	Knowledge, Access, and the Public Elaine Maisner (UNC Press) Elaine Westbrooks (UNC Libraries) Lovey Cooper (Scalawag Magazine) Tammy Baggett (Durham County Library) Facilitator: Meli Kimathi, Communication	All. Contemporary library & publisher approaches to making new knowledges accessible against technological and resource barriers.
3 p.m. (Panel D) University Room, Hyde Hall, Institute for the Arts & Humanities	Supporting Local Arts & a Healthy Arts Ecosystem ft. Orange County Public Art Commissioner Amanda Graham (Carolina Performing Arts) Fred Joiner (Carrboro Poet Laureate) Katie Murray (Orange County Art Commission) Susan Harbage Page (Associate Professor, Women & Gender Studies) Facilitator: Elizabeth Engelhardt	How do we characterize the local arts economy, and what is (and ought to be) the university’s role?
5:30 p.m. Ackland Art Museum	Wine & Snacks Reception Event Co-Hosted by Orange County Art Commission and the College of Arts & Sciences Featuring Culture Mill et al	An opportunity for scholars and staff to mingle with local artists and performers Featuring local performers including Culture Mill

	Saturday, May 4th
	Symposium
9 a.m. Hyde Hall, Institute for the Arts & Humanities	Breakfast	Bagels, fruit, and coffee
10 a.m. Incubator Room, Hyde Hall	Keynote Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Courtney Reid-Eaton, and Sangodare	Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Sangodare, and Courtney Reid-Eaton will lead a participatory keynote accompanied by a Black feminist book installation.
11am, 12noon, 2pm & 3pm - Concurrent with Sessions Below Incubator and Seminar Rooms of the Institute for the Arts & Humanities, Hyde Hall	**Unconference Style Breakout Sessions** Topics TBA	Propose a Breakout Session here: http://tiny.cc/ProposeBreakout Participants will have the opportunity to vote on topics in person on Saturday morning.
11 a.m. University Room, Hyde Hall, Institute for the Arts & Humanities	Becoming Allies: What Makes a Good University Partner Joseph Jordan (Sonja Hanes Stone Center) Della Pollock (Marian Cheek Jackson Center for Saving & Making History) Susan Brown (Chapel Hill Public Library) Facilitator: Kim Allen, Kenan Scholars Program Director	Reflections from long-standing local cultural leaders about the practical challenges and imperatives to form lasting and meaningful partnerships.
12:30 p.m.	Lunch Grab a boxed lunch and find a spot with your new friends!	A lunch conversation, in breakout groups, between grads, faculty, and staff about challenges and needs in mentoring grad students for professional success (as grads’ themselves define it).
1:45 p.m. University Room, Hyde Hall, Institute for the Arts & Humanities	Organizing Culture: Making Change with the Humanities Daniel Fisher (National Humanities Alliance) Barbara Lau (Pauli Murray Project) Raphael Ginsberg (Friday Center Correctional Education Program) Facilitator: Molly Luby, Special Projects Coordinator, Chapel Hill Public Library	Dynamic approach to understanding the many faces of cultural organizing in the broad education & cultural sector.
3:15 p.m. University Room, Hyde Hall, Institute for the Arts & Humanities	Reckonings: Local History and Racial Equity Charlotte Fryar, Reclaiming the University of the People Danita Mason-Hogan & Molly Luby, Remembering the Chapel Hill Nine James Williams, Orange County Community Remembrance Coalition Vera Cecelski, Stagville State Historic Site	Spotlight on local history-and-present projects at the campus, town, county, and regional level which are aim to remediate racial inequity.
4:45 p.m.	Closing Remarks	Robyn Schroeder, Director, Humanities for the Public Good Initiative

Those with questions may write to the Humanities for the Public Good Initiative Director Robyn Schroeder (rschroeder [at] unc.edu). Don’t be strangers.

Our Theme: “Why We’re Here”

We chose the theme “Why We’re Here” to center the core impulse of the Humanities for the Public Good initiative, which is our collective human urge to promote the well-being of others–to serve the public good itself, and to engage in critical conversations about the histories of doing that well and badly, and forward evidence and experience-based conversations about ongoing and needed changes in higher education and the cultural sector. We invite engaged scholars, humanists, artists, and cultural workers to come together in a democratic spirit for constructive discussion and workshopping. To talk about why we’re here, in or at Chapel Hill, Orange County, or the Research Triangle, is to promote our collective morale by reminding us what the point of higher education in the humanities is in the first place–to improve minds and lives, to learn from each other, and to build the ideas and questions that lead to relationships, problem-solving, and a culture that reflects the best of what we know.

Humanists have much to learn from others and each other about doing engaged project work–whether in public scholarship, engaged teaching, project-based service, or otherwise. We’ve drawn out a schedule which highlights just some of the vectors of experimentation right now, flagging opportunities and resources as well as sources of inspiration. Key topics include:

• pathways for developing engagement skills
• making knowledge public and accessible
• supporting local artists and understanding the problems and possibilities in the local arts economy
• practical approaches to university-community partnership
• in keeping with Humanities for the Public Good’s upcoming critical projects theme of “Reckonings and Reconciliation”, learning about projects uncovering local histories of marginalization, anti-blackness, and exclusion

A Note on the Small Group Breakout Sessions: Unconferencing Our Symposium

Many folks indicated an interest in taking time to talk across disciplines and professions about public engagement topics, outside of the panel/lecture format. We set aside the Incubator Room at the IAH on Saturday, May 4th, for one-hour meetings proposed by symposium attendees. Symposium attendees had a chance to read proposals and vote 4-6 proposals into existence over breakfast that day.

Humanities for the Public Good Graduate Coordinator Meli Kimathi (mem [//at//] email.unc.edu) coordinated this portion.

Before the HPG Symposium: Popular Narratives and the Experience of War

Co-sponsored by Humanities for the Public Good, the Graduate School, the Carolina Veterans Resource Center, the History Department, and the English & Comparative Literature Department, learn more about the panel discussion and veterans’ writing workshop which took place on Saturday, April 27th, under the direction and management of doctoral students Davis Winkie and Paul Blom.