Archives for August 2016

After The Death Of Art (Carl Raschke)

Even if God is dead, art is not. And art is starting to come alive again through powerful new forms of collaborative partnerships between artists and commercial interests as part of a new movement that the Austrian inventors of the term have called “strategic art branding”. Up until the late…

Ambient Rhetoric And Graphic Novels (Sergio C. Figueiredo)

In the fall of 2015 I taught a Literary Genre course Kennesaw State University in Georgia on the Graphic Novel (ENGL 3230 Syllabus).  I taught it from the perspective of rhetorical genres as described by Carolyn Miller in “Genre as Social Action.” the features of which are as follows: Genre…

Putting Picasso On The Economic Development Council (Carl Raschke)

Placemaking, often characterized as a “people-centered” strategy for revitalizing communities through a stakeholder-driven transformation of public spaces, is one of the hottest new trends in both urban planning and the interdisciplinary arts and humanities. As the literature of the Project for Public Spaces, which many consider the leading  advocacy organization …

Comics And The Public Arts (Sergio Figueiredo)

This year marks the 170th anniversary of the publication of Rudolphe Töpffer’s Essai de Physiognomonie, a work addressing the theoretical grounding informing the invention of graphic literature and public scholarship that has much in common with contemporary issues surrounding the role of academic discourse in public discourse. While well known…

Academia’s Outer Limits (Michael O’Rourke)

Recently I have spent a great deal of time thinking about the name we might give, however provisionally, to those who work at the furthermost reaches of the academic institution. For a long time I had adopted the term para-academia, and this term continues to do productive and unsettling work…

Anthony Bourdain Meets Mother Theresa – “Voluntourism” Goes Global (Joy Steinberg)

A 2007 Habitat for Humanity trip to Honduras was my first exposure to the third world.  Spending a week in Santa Rosa de Copan and working side by side with future homeowners was truly humbling and eye-opening. Our task for the week was to dig ditches to accommodate the water…

Shopping And The Design Of Mobile Apps As Inwardness (Colbey Reid)

One of the hazards of living in great place when you’re a student is the knowledge that when you’re done with school, you will probably have to leave there to find work. That isn’t a dilemma that plagues all professions, but it is exactly the problem that confronted me after…

Popular Culture, Native Ontology, and the Misuse of Mascots (Kenneth Lokensgard)

The concerns of many Native Americans, regarding their representation in the popular media, have been in the news of late.  Those opposed to the use of Native American-themed sports mascots, images, or team names have highlighted the fact that such representations often perpetuate negative stereotypes and reflect an attitude of…

Understand Shakespeare – Engaging the Critic, the Student and the Community (Joe Aldinger)

The semester of a literary professor often begins in the same way as psychoanalysis—with a bit of resistance. That is especially true if you teach “ancient” texts like Shakespeare, Milton, and Donne.   A colleague of mine recently made this discovery when teaching Margaret Edson’s W;t, a play about a Donne…

Drinkin’ N’ Thinkin’ – Further Reflections (Colbey Reid)

The Fair Game Beverage Company, a small-batch distillery in Pittsboro, NC, has partnered with a Research Triangle professor and Chapel Hill mixologist to revive the ancient tradition of the symposium. The Oxford English Dictionary stylizes these Classical Greek events as “intellectual entertainment.” The distillery uses a folksier parlance. They call…