Category Archives: American University

The Humanities Truck

The Humanities Truck

Collect        Reflect         Exhibit         Preserve

The Humanities Truck is a fully customized delivery truck that serves as an experimental mobile platform for collecting, exhibiting, preserving, and expanding dialogue around the humanities.  Using the truck, we seek to mobilize the humanities and democratize the sharing and production of knowledge by bringing together scholars at American University with community residents across Washington, D.C.  Together we  can collect, create, interpret, and curate stories that can return to the communities they originated from and circulate throughout the metropolitan region.

The Humanities Truck Project began as an idea that was cultivated by one of the Humanities Lab’s very first working groups.  Today the Lab and the Truck work closely together to mobilize the humanities at American University and throughout Washington, DC.

 

Find out more on the new website for this project:

http://humanitiestruck.com/

The Crisis in Fukushima

How do we understand the impact and aftermath of natural disasters?  As part of our series of events on Crisis Narratives, we are delighted to welcome Celine-Marie Pascale, professor of Sociology at American University.


Vernacular Epistemologies of Risk: The Crisis in Fukushima

Wednesday, October 14, 1 pm at 228 Battelle-Tompkins Hall

fukushima1fukushima 2   bp36
On March 11, 2011 a major earthquake hit the coast of Japan. With a magnitude of 9.0  and an epicenter off the Pacific coast of Tōhoku, this was the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan, and the fourth most powerful earthquake in the world since the advent of modern recording methods in 1900. More than 15,000 people died, hundreds of thousands were displaced, and millions of households were left without electricity or water.
The earthquake triggered tsunami waves that reached 40 meters (133 feet) in height in some areas and were even deadlier and more destructive than the earthquake. In addition to flooding and destroying major coastal areas in Japan, the tsunami caused the level 7 meltdown of three nuclear reactors in the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant complex.
What do you know about the nuclear disaster at Fukushima? Media hold unprecedented capacity to frame the presence and meaning of disasters, particularly where global risks are concerned. For this talk, Celine-Marie Pascale, professor of Sociology and expert in the fields of epistemology and language, examines the production of U.S. media discourses regarding the public health risks posed by the massive nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Power Plant. Based on analysis of over 2100 media accounts, she illustrates how media discourses created vernacular epistemologies that constituted not only particular kinds of knowledge but also particular kinds of global citizens.
The earthquake and tsunami events, commonly known in Japan as “3/11,” caused dramatic transformations to the natural, built, and social environments. But as professor Pascale discusses in this project, there were also epistemic changes arising from this disaster that are less obvious but perhaps no less profound in their consequences.  Her study is based on a textual analysis of all articles published between March 11, 2011 and March 11, 2013 about the Fukushima disaster in four of the most prominent media outlets in the United States: the Washington Post and The New York Times and two nationally prominent blogs, Politico and The Huffington Post.  This analysis will illustrate how systematic media practices minimized the presence of health risks, contributed to misinformation, and exacerbated uncertainties.  The discourses of risk in media provided a very particular vernacular epistemology for risk assessment, both now and in the future.  Through dominant reporting practices, media did not just shape perceptions of the Fukushima disaster, they provided heuristics—a vernacular epistemology— through which the importance and risk of nuclear radiation is to be understood.

Celine-Marie-Pascale-140620bTo find about more about professor Pascale’s research, click here.


The Great East Japan Earthquake

A brief overview of the earthquake.

Click here to read the Wikipedia entry for the 2011 earthquake in Japan.

2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami

Click here to read a brief overview on LiveScience

Japan Earthquake and Tsunami of 2011


2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami

2004_Indian_Ocean_earthquake_-_affected_countriesOn December 26, 2004 a major earthquake occurred off the west coast of Sumatra, Indonesia. Known as the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake  or as the Sumatra–Andaman earthquake, this undersea earthquake was the 3rd largest earthquake ever recorded, with a magnitude of 9.1 to 9.3, and lasted between 8 and 10 minutes. Killing more than 230,000 people in 14 countries, this is one of the deadliest natural disasters in recorded history. The series of tsunamis that followed the earthquake  reached up to 30 meters in height (100 feet). Indonesia was the hardest-hit country, followed by Sri Lanka, India, and Thailand.

Read more about this earthquake and its aftermath on Wikipedia:

2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami

main_1200A photo essay in The Atlantic Monthly by Alan Taylor,  reporting on the 10 year anniversary of the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami:

Ten Years Since the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami

From BBC News, a report on rebuilding the communities destroyed by the tsunami:

Indian Ocean Tsunami: Then and Now


How Tsunamis Work

Infographics:

uhrmacher_tsunami

Tsunami Smart_Poster_Science_Impact_Safety.indd        

Screen Shot 2015-08-22 at 5.57.46 PM An animated TED lecture about what causes tsunamis

Reporting from Crisis Zones

To launch our series of events on the concept of crisis, we are delighted to feature the work of Bill Gentile, journalist, filmmaker and professor at American University’s School of Communication. View photos from the event

06.-Kabl-demo2  Contra-troops-training-in-001  Nic013

Reporting from Crisis Zones

Wednesday September 23, 2015, 1 pm

Malsi Doyle and Michael Forman Theater, McKinley Building 2nd floor


About Bill Gentile

Bill Gentile is an independent journalist and documentary filmmaker teaching at American University in Washington, DC. His career spans three decades, five continents and nearly every facet of journalism and mass communication, most especially visual communication, or visual storytelling. He is the founder and director of American University’s Backpack Journalism Project. He is a pioneer of “backpack video journalism” and today he is one of the craft’s most noted practitioners. He is the author of the highly acclaimed “Essential Video Journalism Field Manual.” He engineered the School of Journalism’s 2015 partnership with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and is the driving force behind that initiative.

Bill Gentile began his career in 1977 as reporter for the Mexico City News and correspondent for United Press International (UPI) based in Mexico City. He covered the 1979 Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua. He spent two years as editor on UPI’s Foreign Desk in New York, then moved to Nicaragua and became Newsweek Magazine’s Contract Photographer for Latin America and the Caribbean. His book of photographs, “Nicaragua,” won the Overseas Press Club Award for Excellence. He covered the U.S.-backed Contra War in Nicaragua and the Salvadoran Civil War in the 1980s; the U.S. invasion of Panama; the 1994 invasion of Haiti, the ongoing conflict with Cuba, the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War and the subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He’s also worked in Ivory Coast, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Chad, Angola, Rwanda and Burundi.

In 1995 Gentile went to work for Video News International (VNI), precursor of The New York Times Television Company. He has completed assignments for The Learning Channel, the Discovery Channel, National Geographic Television, ABC’s Nightline With Ted Koppel, NOW With Bill Moyers, NOW hosted by David Brancaccio, Court TV and Lion TV.

He shared the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Human Rights Reporting, Honorable Mention, for a story on rape during the 1994 Rwanda Genocide. He shared two National Emmy Awards and was nominated for two others.


Have a look at some of his work here:

God and Gangs: Criminal Violence and Religion in Guatemala

Screen Shot 2015-07-31 at 5.01.12 PMScreen Shot 2015-07-31 at 5.11.31 PMScreen Shot 2015-07-31 at 5.06.05 PM

A 3-part film series on religion and gangs in Guatemala. Click on the links to see the films on YouTube

I. The Gangs

II. The Researcher

III. The Pastor

Cuba’s (Rocky) Love Affair with the Harley-DavidsonScreen Shot 2015-07-31 at 5.20.40 PM

In Cuba, Harley-Davidson parts are hard to come by. Lovers of the American motorcycle go to great lengths to keep them running.

Click here to watch the film

 

 

 

Screen Shot 2015-07-31 at 5.46.47 PMThe White House: Inside America’s Most Famous Home

Gentile worked as Documentary Consultant  for this full-length documentary, for which C-SPAN gained unprecedented access to areas of the White House never before filmed. It aired nationwide on 14 November 2008, and has aired numerous times since then, and the DVD has become the best-selling DVD ever distributed by C-SPAN.

Click here to watch the film on C-SPAN.com

Crisis Narratives | 2015-2016

Crisis Narratives landing page banner

During the 2015-16 academic year, the Humanities Lab investigated the concept of crisis with a series of linked lectures, readings, workshops, and discussions. We explored major contemporary events that we might describe by using this term, and interrogated the narratives that emerge from such critical moments.

Part of our task is to redirect our understanding of the concept itself. In contemporary use “crisis” seems to refer most directly to disaster or catastrophe, to extreme situations or events whose impact is immeasurable. Alternatively, “crisis” is often presented as an opportunity, an opening of spaces that can be filled with our preexisting agendas and priorities. People tend to think of a crisis as a situation that is fast-paced or uncontrollable, and that requires expedient or categorical solutions. Characterized by a news cycle that seems to be addicted to crisis, our media and cultural landscapes create a public sphere that is often reeling from one grand apocalypse to another.

Do we need to assume that moments of crisis require fast thinking and fast action? Communities, governments, international governance bodies, and aid organizations have become much more efficient in deploying help and inventing solutions for different types of disasters. Emergency preparedness has become a national and international priority. But many contemporary issues require a different time frame. Responding to a dangerous situation must be quick and effective, but do decisions and actions have to be fast? Something is lost when “action” becomes merely “reaction.” And what about forethought and planning? What about the situations we know are critical, and that we have to start addressing or responding to before they erupt into a proverbial crisis?

In ancient Greek the word “crisis” (κρίσις) refers to judgement, to turning points and decisions. Thinking about crisis as a moment of reflection or decision, a moment of judgement and evaluation, might allow us to reconsider our approach.  Allowing time for reflection may bring awareness to the fact that at its core the word “crisis” also includes a slower time frame. Perhaps it is time to imagine a more deliberative, future-focused, proactive, and indeed critical response to the challenges of the contemporary world.


Fall 2015 Lecture Series

reportingBill Gentle | Reporting from Crisis Zones

We launched our series of events on the concept of crisis with the work of Bill Gentile, journalist, filmmaker and professor at American University’s School of Communication.

Gentile is the founder and director of American University’s Backpack Journalism Project. He is a pioneer of “backpack video journalism” and today he is one of the craft’s most noted practitioners. He is the author of the highly acclaimed “Essential Video Journalism Field Manual.” He engineered the School of Journalism’s 2015 partnership with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and is the driving force behind that initiative.

FukushimaCeline-Marie Pascale | Vernacular Epistemologies of Risk: The Crisis in Fukushima

Celine-Marie Pascale, professor of Sociology and expert in the fields of epistemology and language, examined the production of U.S. media discourses regarding the public health risks posed by the massive nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Power Plant. Based on analysis of over 2100 media accounts, she illustrates how media discourses created vernacular epistemologies that constituted not only particular kinds of knowledge but also particular kinds of global citizens.

The earthquake and tsunami events, commonly known in Japan as “3/11,” caused dramatic transformations to the natural, built, and social environments. But as professor Pascale discusses in this project, there were also epistemic changes arising from this disaster that are less obvious but perhaps no less profound in their consequences. The discourses of risk in media provided a very particular vernacular epistemology for risk assessment, both now and in the future. Through dominant reporting practices, media did not just shape perceptions of the Fukushima disaster, they provided heuristics—a vernacular epistemology— through which the importance and risk of nuclear radiation is to be understood.

Drivingdetroit_2George Galster | Driving Detroit: The Quest for Respect in the Motor City

For most of the twentieth century, Detroit was a symbol of American industrial might, a place of entrepreneurial and technical ingenuity where the latest consumer inventions were made available to everyone through the genius of mass production. Today, Detroit is better known for its dwindling population, moribund automobile industry, and alarmingly high murder rate. In Driving Detroit, author George Galster, a fifth-generation Detroiter and internationally known urbanist, sets out to understand how the city has come to represent both the best and worst of what cities can be, all within the span of a half century. Galster invites the reader to travel with him along the streets and into the soul of this place to grasp fully what drives the Motor City.

With a scholar’s rigor and a local’s perspective, Galster uncovers why metropolitan Detroit’s cultural, commercial, and built landscape has been so radically transformed. He shows how geography, local government structure, and social forces created a housing development system that produced sprawl at the fringe and abandonment at the core. Galster argues that this system, in tandem with the region’s automotive economic base, has chronically frustrated the population’s quest for basic physical, social, and psychological resources. These frustrations, in turn, generated numerous adaptations—distrust, scapegoating, identity politics, segregation, unionization, and jurisdictional fragmentation—that collectively leave Detroit in an uncompetitive and unsustainable position.

Cosponsored with the Metropolitan Policy Center, American University

CitizenClaudia Rankine | Citizen: An American Lyric

Claudia Rankine visited American University in November 2015 for a series of events connected to her award-winning book Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf Press, 2014).

Citizen: An American Lyric is a cutting meditation on race and the crisis of citizenship in contemporary America. The Humanities Lab partnered with the Creative Writing Program Visiting Writers Series and the Department of Literature to discuss the book at several events.

Rankine is the author of five collections of poetry and two plays and is the editor of multiple anthologies. Citizen was the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, the NAACP Image Award, the 2015 Forward Prize for Best Collection, and the PEN Open Book Award.


Spring 2016 Lecture Series

protestcultureegyptElliott Colla | Revolution in Verse: Protest Culture in Egypt

Professor Elliott Colla (Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies, Georgetown University) discussed the literary heritage of “The Arab Spring” as a way of evaluating how poetry informs activism and political protest.

When Egyptians took to the streets five years ago, they armed themselves with poems. During the initial 18-day period of revolution, the soundtrack was that of rhyming couplets and song, through which revolutionaries managed to articulate a wide range of demands, complaints and dreams. What is it about poetry that makes it so useful to protest movements? What can the study of slogans teach us about poetry and literature?

A celebrated scholar of Arabic literature, translator, and novelist, Professor Colla is currently a William Bentinck-Smith Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, Harvard University. This engaging talk on political slogans in Egypt was part of his new book in progress, The People Wanted: Words, Movements, and Egyptian Revolution.

domesticviolenceRachel Louise Snyder | Eradicating Domestic Violence

In this lecture Rachel Louise Snyder presented her groundbreaking investigation into domestic violence, and offered her insights about how new methods of evaluation and new collaborative practices can make a difference in curbing domestic homicide. Featured in The New Yorker and other major publications, her research is also informing discussions of policy, and changing law enforcement and social programs that respond to domestic violence today.

environmentalcrisisPaul Wapner | The Global Environmental Crisis

For decades, environmentalists have been sounding the alarm about the environmental “crisis.” They warn that the earth’s ecosystems are in acute danger and that injustices abound as people exploit each other through the medium of nature. How useful is the concept of “crisis” to describe environmental degradation? It is certainly the case that climate change, freshwater scarcity, loss of biological diversity, and other factors are undermining the planet’s life-support systems, and that untold numbers of people and creatures are affected. But does labeling these phenomena as a “crisis” help or hinder humanity’s ability to respond? In this talk, Professor Paul Wapner examined the relationship between crisis and response.

Jay Melder | Responding to Homelessness in DC

Jay Melder, Chief of Staff at the DC Department of Human Services, discussed the challenge of homelessness for the future of DC. Our city has experienced incredible change and growth in the last decades, but still struggles with poverty, gentrification, the displacement of long-time residents, and urban homelessness. Melder explained how city agencies, organizations, and officials take on the challenges of chronic homelessness in a city that has been radically transformed in recent years by new urban developments and changing demographics.


You can view or download the poster here:

    

Poster design by Devin Symons, 2015,  and Zachary Porter, 2016

Citizen: An American Lyric

We are delighted to welcome Claudia Rankine at American University in November 2015, for a series of events connected to her award-winning book Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf Press, 2014).

 71SxmbgcRuL                    Claudia Rankine

Citizen: An American Lyric is a cutting meditation on race and the crisis of citizenship in contemporary America. This November we are discussing this book in a number of linked events:

  • November 12, 2015, 7 pm: Claudia Rankine reads from her book, at the Abramson Family Recital Hall, Katzen Arts Center. This reading is open to the public.

  • Related event:

  • November 11, 2015, 9 am to 5 pm:  Colloquium on Claudia Rankine’s Citizen. A full day of readings, critical approaches and discussions by students, faculty, and members of the community. This day of exploration of Claudia Rankine’s work is open to the public.

  • To see the schedule for this event please click here

 

The Humanities Lab is proud to cosponsor these events with the Creative Writing Program Visiting Writers Series, the Department of Literature and the generous support of Dean of Academic Affairs Mary Clark.
Check back here in October for the full schedule of events for the Literature Colloquium.
You can buy Citizen: An American Lyric on Amazon, or at the American University Bookstore on the AU campus.

 


Read more about Claudia Rankine

 

  • Articles and Reviews

Claudia Rankine in the New York TimesThe New York Times, “A Poetry Personal and Political: Claudia Rankine on ‘Citizen’ and Racial Politics”

 

 

Screen Shot 2015-07-30 at 4.31.59 PMThe Guardian, “Poet Claudia Rankine: Racism Works Purely on Perception in America”

Screen Shot 2015-07-30 at 4.33.32 PMKCRW, “Claudia Rankine: The Racial Imaginary”

 

 

 

 

Screen Shot 2015-08-25 at 11.22.55 PMThe New Yorker, “Color Codes”

 

 

 

 

Screen Shot 2015-08-25 at 11.34.12 PMThe New York Review of Books, “A New Way of Writing About Race”

 

 

 

 


 

  • Other books by Claudia Rankine

Click on the titles to go to the Amazon page for each book

Don't let me be lonely

Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (Graywolf Press, 2004)

51v6mvJoTRL._SX331_BO1,204,203,200_

American Women Poets in the 21st Century (Wesleyan, 2002)

51TekUHX1WL

Plot (Grove Press, 2001)

The end of the alphabet

The End of the Alphabet (Grove Press, 1998)

 

 

 

Working Group Applications are here!

The Humanities Lab working groups provide faculty, students and  members of the American University community with an opportunity to meet each other and share work on common topics. You can apply to coordinate or start a new working group at any time. You can find the application of this website as a Word document or a PDF, or you can fill in the online form at the AU website.

Download the application:

Working_Groups_Application_2015

Apply online:

http://www.american.edu/cas/humanities-lab/app-group.cfm