2015 Program

A university is more than an amalgamation of several colleges. It also is an organization which celebrates the full richness of faculty contributions including those vital and exciting contributions in research, scholarship and creative activity within their disciplines. These contributions come in many forms: journal articles, book chapters, monographs, art works, music compositions, performances of many varieties and a host of others. Funded research contributions are similarly varied. Through such activities, faculty members stay at the growing edges of their fields, and in so doing, they enrich their intellectual lives as well as those of their students. Once again, I invite each participant at this event today to browse the contributions of your colleagues, ask questions, and celebrate the intellectual vitality of our university community. Each year as this event grows and widens its reach and audience, it continues to inspire and impress me. I am sure it will do the same for you. Provost Dr. Blair Lordhttps://thekeep.eiu.edu/scholars_programs/1002/thumbnail.jp

News from Hope College, Volume 47.1: August, 2015

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Spectacular Pain:Violence and the White Gaze in American Commemorative Culture

Using case studies that range from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century in literature, photography, performance, and museums, this thesis examines how the white gaze has shaped commemorative representations of slavery and racial violence. Through mapping how visual representational tropes have rendered the Black body in pain a passive receptacle of violence to accommodate an audiences’ emotional engagement, I argue that the foundation of commemorative practice’s focus lies within white western notions of pain, power, and the body, which ultimately risks obfuscating African American lived and historical experience. Fundamentally, this study also considers how Black authors, artists, and activists have worked to respond to and challenge these representations. I begin with an explication of how anti-slavery authors and artists in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries perpetuated white modes of looking at Black pain, before proceeding to trace the thread of representations following slavery and abolition that focus primarily on Black pain to emotionally engage with audiences. I interrogate photographic representations of slavery and racial violence, including the famous image of “Gordon” and his scarred back, James Allen and John Littlefield’s Without Sanctuary collection, and the work of African American photographer J.P. Ball. I also examine reenactment performances including Colonial Williamsburg’s 1994 reenacted slave auction, Conner Prairie’s ‘Follow the North Star’ programme, Dread Scott’s ‘Slave Rebellion Reenactment’, and the Moore’s Ford lynching reenactment. This research draws from observational research conducted at key museum and memorial sites, including the Whitney Plantation (2014), the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (2016), and the Equal Justice Initiative’s National Memorial to Peace and Justice and Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration (2018). As the most recently established sites, these institutions provide an illuminating record of how far commemorative practice has come, and hint at new directions for its future. Ultimately, I advocate for commemorative sites to establish and prioritise explicit connections between slavery, the foundation of the US, and the impact of racial violence on present-day racial inequality. To do so, I highlight the importance of how commemorative sites in the present can draw inspiration from Black embodied acts of counter-narrative production to re-humanise their historical representations of Black enslaved and Black suffering bodies and free them from the constraints of the white gaze

Learning from wilderness fire: restoring landscape scale patterns and processes

Wilderness areas, because they are managed to be “untrammeled by man,” often offer the best approximation of intact, undisturbed ecological patterns and processes. In the case of wildland fire, this means that wilderness areas often provide the only landscapes where fire has been managed to play an active, ecosystem role. As a result, these wilderness areas offer unique lessons both in terms of wildland fire management as well as the ecological consequences that result from this management approach. For these reasons, an in-depth history of fire management in the wilderness areas of the Northern Rocky Mountains is provided to highlight the lessons learned from these long-running programs where fire has been managed for resource benefit. The four decades of wilderness fire management across three wilderness areas revealed that wildland fire management is most likely to occur when land managers possess a strong commitment to the untrammeled nature of wilderness, when fire management personnel are well versed in long-term fire management strategies and skill sets, and when strong lines of communication are in place, both across administrative boundaries and between land managers and the public. From this history and these lessons learned, recommendations were developed for strengthening wildland fire management for resource benefit across the western U.S., including outside of Congressionally designated wilderness. These recommendations include bolstering the workforce capacity and incentive structure related to fire management for resource benefit, improving communication tactics regarding wildland fire management objectives, and cultivating an ecological fire ethic within land management agencies. Finally, using data collected from mixed-conifer forest plots in the Bob Marshall Wilderness of Northwest Montana, I investigated the forest stand structures that result from an active fire regime. I then identified the pathways to development for the identified stand structures, as well as the drivers of conversion of forest to non-forest structure following fire and the role of fire in creating within-structure class heterogeneity. From these analyses, I produce a data-driven conceptual model of stand structure development under an active fire regime. The results of these studies, taken together, point to the importance of wilderness areas as valuable sources of information on ecosystem processes and patterns, such as wildland fire and forest structure

The Trinity Reporter, Spring 2016

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Educational Technology and Related Education Conferences for June to December 2015

The 33rd edition of the conference list covers selected events that primarily focus on the use of technology in educational settings and on teaching, learning, and educational administration. Only listings until December 2015 are complete as dates, locations, or Internet addresses (URLs) were not available for a number of events held from January 2016 onward. In order to protect the privacy of individuals, only URLs are used in the listing as this enables readers of the list to obtain event information without submitting their e-mail addresses to anyone. A significant challenge during the assembly of this list is incomplete or conflicting information on websites and the lack of a link between conference websites from one year to the next