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Virginia Tech Humanities Week

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Virginia Tech Humanities Week Oct. 22-27

From Al technology to prison reform, join experts from Virginia Tech and across the nation as we explore issues facing society.

What is Humanities Week?

Virginia Tech Humanities Week highlights the essential work happening in the humanities at Virginia Tech and around the world. Members of the Virginia Tech community and beyond are invited to attend panel discussions, Q&As, and more interactive activities throughout the weeklong celebration set for October 22-27, 2023.  Humanities Week is sponsored by the Center for Humanities and the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences. All Humanities Week events are free and open to the public unless otherwise noted.

Register for Humanities Week in advance to receive program updates, Zoom links for virtual attendance, and more!

Events and Speakers

George Chochos

Keynote Speaker

Date: Wednesday, Oct. 25

Time: 6:00 p.m.

Location: Squires Student Center: Haymarket Theatre, 290 College Avenue

Description: George Chochos’s keynote address, "From Jail to Yale: Education is Humanization in the Carceral Context and Beyond" will focus on prison education initiatives and the power of a humanities education. The keynote address is free and open to the public.

George Chochos is a senior program associate with Vera, a social justice organization. A skillful, charismatic speaker who understands personally the value of humanities education, Chochos earned a graduate humanities degree from Yale University. He also earned four degrees during his nearly 12 years in prison.

Get Involved

Support the Virginia Tech Prison Book Project

A team of students and faculty in our college are working together to send books to incarcerated people across Virginia. The Virginia Tech Prison Book Project embodies Ut Prosim (That I May Serve), a motto of selfless servitude and passion for community outreach that searches for humanity in everyone.


Sessions

Oral History Presentation and Workshop

Ren Harman, Jason Higgins, and Jessica Taylor

Time: 9:00-11:00 a.m.
Location: Newman Library, Special Collections and University Archives (First Floor)

For the past few decades, scholars and practitioners at Virginia Tech have collected and used oral histories to incorporate the voices, memories, and perspectives of the people and communities at the heart of important historical events and trends. The practice of oral history and the realization for a more defined research center, led to the establishment of the University Libraries’ Center for Oral History.  Members of the stakeholders committee for the Center for Oral History will additionally offer a workshop session on best practices for oral history and information about the equipment available from the Center.

Oral history and the humanities share a deep and symbiotic relationship, as both disciplines seek to understand and preserve the rich tapestry of human experiences, cultures, and narratives.  Oral history, a methodology within the broader field of history, involves the collection and preservation of firsthand accounts and narratives from individuals and communities.  Through humanities, oral histories gain meaning, revealing broader social, cultural, and philosophical themes that resonate with the human experience. Moreover, oral history humanizes historical events and gives voice to marginalized or silenced perspectives, promoting empathy, inclusivity, and a more holistic understanding of our shared past.


A Poetic Meditation on Re(new)al After Lockdown

Carol A. Mullen and Charles L. Lowery

Time: 12:00 p.m.
Location: Zoom Only: Register to Receive Link in Advance

Participants are invited to engage in “repairing the world” in post-pandemic times, in alignment with Dewey’s concept of growth and Freire’s notion of becoming. The democratic discourse will invite listeners to reflectively engage their emotional, aesthetic, and intellectual acumen.

This interactive session will engage the humanities from an educational-poetic perspective. A broader aim is to foster intellectual and aesthetic engagement with poems while sharpening critical and creative thinking skills.  

Two faculty in educational leadership will spark deep listening and meaning-making through the live reading of an original educationally-steeped poem and the interpretive unpacking of its verses.   


Let’s All Play D&D: A Live Demo of Cognitive Access Tools and Inclusive Adventures

Open the Gates Gaming: Elizabeth McLain, Christopher Campo-Bowen, and Alice Rogers with Ashley Shew, Tyechia Thompson, and Kereshmeh Afsari, and special guests Caitlin Martinkus and Scott Hanenberg from the Cleveland Institute of Music

Time: 1:00–2:30 p.m. (presentation), 3:00–6:00 p.m. (hands-on workshop)
Location: Newman Library Room 207A and Zoom: Register to Receive Link in Advance

Note: Presentation from 1:00 to 2:30 p.m. From 3:00 to 6:00 p.m., we will be available to anyone who would like to try out the tools and play Dungeons & Dragons with us.  
 
Hosted by Open the Gates Gaming: Elizabeth McLain, Christopher Campo-Bowen, and Alice Rogers with Ashley Shew, Tyechia Thompson, and Kereshmeh Afsari, and special guests Caitlin Martinkus and Scott Hanenberg from the Cleveland Institute of Music

Our project, Open the Gates Gaming (OtG), is part of the Disability Community Technology Center, supported by the Mellon Foundation. OtG formed in response to our local disability community’s desire to play D&D together despite the challenges this rules-heavy game poses to neurodivergent people, such as those with ADHD, autism, and chemo brain. As we developed tools to expand who can tell their stories, we also discovered that we needed to broaden how they can be told. 

Showcasing this intersectional approach to access, College of Architecture, Arts, and Design faculty member Christopher Campo-Bowen will guide Kereshmeh Afsari (Myers-Lawson School of Construction), Ashley Shew and Tyechia Thompson (CLAHS) on an adventure that reconsiders the totalizing narratives inherent in one of the most elite art forms in European history: opera. The audience will learn about our open-access tools – which can support them as they slay monsters, solve mysteries, and create new and better worlds. Participants will also learn how engaging with the humanities through play yields better access outcomes than simple technical compliance, but most importantly, all work that strives to empower historically marginalized communities must be led by them.


Is This Home? Sharing Stories and Art About Making Home in Southwest Virginia

College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences Storytelling Collective

Time: 5:00 p.m.
Location: Haymarket Theatre

Experience an examination of what “home” is through a range of storytelling techniques, from traditional storytelling to spoken word, dance and song – creating a space that is respectful of diverse forms of cultural expression.

Audience members will hear a set of prepared short stories, then explore ways to tell your own stories through movement and visual arts. The event will conclude with a resource expo of campus and community support for making home among the joys and struggles we all face.

This is planned to be the first in a series of events throughout the year along this theme, both on campus and in the community.


Poe’s Shadows, an immersive theatrical installation

Meaghan Dee, Amanda Nelson, Todd Ogle, Ashley Reed, Natasha Staley, Tanner Upthegrove, Ethan Candelario
With additional contributions from students from SOPA, SOVA, and ARIES.

Time: 2:00-5:30 p.m.
Location: Moss Arts Center, Sandbox and Perform Studio

Drawing from two of Edgar Allan Poe’s most well-known works, “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Raven,” the installation explores what happens when literary texts are lifted from the “page to the stage” and then reimagined through the use of new technology. Inspired by Poe’s texts themselves, crankies (a 19th century artform in which a long, illustrated scroll is wound, revealing imagery related to spoken stories or songs), and shadow play (or puppetry), this installation explores the concept of shadow through text, image, and sound, including recordings of Virginia Tech students reading Poe's works.

Stop by at any point during the timeframe to experience the 15-minute looping display. 


When Mind and Body Meet: Liberal Arts, Martial Arts, and the Academy

Kenneth Hodges and Spencer Bennington

Time: 12:00 p.m.
Location:  340 Shanks Hall

This round table conversation will focus on the various ways the humanities and martial arts intersect as objects of study, as part of lived practice, as richly signifying components of human experience.  It may include demonstrations both of martial arts and of VR video games involving martial arts, and discussion of literature.

From the wrestling in Beowulf to Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon, how people fight – how they move, how they train, how they imagine conflict and peace – has played a significant role in the human experience.  The Japanese concept of 文武両道 (bunbu ryodo) celebrates the way of excelling in both literary and martial arts, but the concept is not unique to Japan or even East Asia: medieval European chivalry or Renaissance humanism likewise celebrated both.  Scholars are beginning to pay more attention to the embodied human experience of martial arts, both in their own lives as people who are both scholars and martial artists, but also in literature, art, and history, where fight scenes carry far more information than may first appear to untrained audiences.   

Spencer Bennington is a black-belt in taekwondo who works on rhetoric and martial arts, particularly in hip-hop and videogames.

Kenneth Hodges is a professor of medieval English and an intermediate student of aikido. 


Poe’s Shadows, an immersive theatrical installation

Meaghan Dee, Amanda Nelson, Todd Ogle, Ashley Reed, Natasha Staley, Tanner Upthegrove, Ethan Candelario
With additional contributions from students from SOPA, SOVA, and ARIES.

Time: 2:00-5:30 p.m.
Location: Moss Arts Center, Sandbox and Perform Studio

Drawing from two of Edgar Allan Poe’s most well-known works, “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Raven,” the installation explores what happens when literary texts are lifted from the “page to the stage” and then reimagined through the use of new technology. Inspired by Poe’s texts themselves, crankies (a 19th century artform in which a long, illustrated scroll is wound, revealing imagery related to spoken stories or songs), and shadow play (or puppetry), this installation explores the concept of shadow through text, image, and sound, including recordings of Virginia Tech students reading Poe's works.

Stop by at any point during the timeframe to experience the 15-minute looping display. 


Histories of Sexual Violence at Virginia Tech

Rosa Mata, Madelyn Nogiec, Kiera Schneiderman, Cait Simson, and facilitated by Alicia Cohen, director of diversity programs in the Office for Inclusion and Diversity

Time: 5:00 p.m.
Location: Liberal Arts and Human Sciences Building (200 Stanger St), Ground Floor Conference Room

This moderated roundtable discussion will feature the findings of original undergraduate student research from a Spring 2023 course. Students reviewed university manuscript collections and wrote an edited volume of chapters, highlighting the campus culture surrounding sexual violence during historical time periods and with different student population segments at Virginia Tech. Come listen to what the students discovered and what conclusions they drew, which were proposed as future action for the Sexual Violence Prevention Initiative committees launched this Fall.


Differ We Must - Lecture and Book Signing

Steve Inskeep

Time: 7:30 p.m.
Location: Lyric Theatre

Sponsored by the Virginia Center for Civil War Studies

Steve Inskeep of NPR's "Morning Edition, discusses his latest book, Differ We Must, which uncovers Lincoln's ability to bridge political divides. 

The event is sponsored by the Virginia Center for Civil War Studies and features a lecture from Steve Inskeep and a book signing.


Performing Alternative Economic Models

Ralph Hall and Steven T. Licardi

Time: 9:00 a.m.
Location: Squires 134 and Zoom (link distributed to guests who register for the week)

For many, our current economic models no longer meet our basic human needs. Over the past two years, performance artist Steven T. Licardi and SPIA faculty member Ralph Hall have been exploring ways to advance new economic thinking – related to Community Wealth Building – through a SciArts project. Through this collaboration, they arrived at “Pingpongomics” and performance art as an engaging way to reveal economic inequality and challenge participants to imagine, explore, and develop alternative economic models.


A Practical Public Goods Mechanism for Policing

Jordan Adamson

Time: 11:00 a.m.
Location: Newman Library Goodall Room, Multipurpose Room

Jordan Adamson, Assistant Professor at the Institute for Empirical Research in Economics in Leipzig (Germany), will give a talk with the title “A Practical Public Goods Mechanism for Policing.”

Lunch will be served.


Fashion History Quiz Game

Dina Smith-Glaviana

Time: 12:00 p.m.
Location: Wallace Hall Atrium

Do you know when Hollywood stars begin to influence fashion?

Stop by and show off your knowledge of fashion history by matching clues like photographs and art prints to historical garments from our Fashion Study Collection! 


Demonstration: Conversational AI for Children's Learning

Jisun Kim, PhD candidate in Child and Adolescent Development, and her fellow researchers

Time: 1:00 p.m.
Location: Wallace Hall Atrium and Zoom (link distributed to guests who register for the week)

We propose to offer a hands-on demonstration in which the public audience can experience how advanced interactive technologies involving conversational AI can be used to understand and support human development, with a focus on young children’s learning. These emerging interactive technologies have been rapidly integrated into our daily lives, presenting both unprecedented opportunities as well as developmental concerns. To maximize their benefits and minimize potential harms, understanding human development in the context of technology is critical.  

Interact with our conversational AI agents deployed on smart speakers, computers, and tablets. These technological tools will read a children's storybook and pose questions to the audience based on a pre-programmed system designed by our team to provide educationally meaningful human-technology interaction. Explore our head-mounted eye trackers and wearable devices as we walk participants through the use of these methodological tools for understanding human cognitive processes.  

Given the growing use of technology in educational settings, we aim to provide the audience with the opportunity to observe how these new conversational AI technologies can be effectively applied in educational contexts to foster learning.


Intelligibility and the Burden of Communication

Abby Walker

Time: 2:00 p.m.
Location: Room 010 Liberal Arts and Human Sciences Building (200 Stanger St.)

Why and how do miscommunications between speakers of the same language happen?  
Even though this it's predictable and unavoidable to some degree, why is (un)intelligibility socially fraught and ideologically-laden?  

Learn the answers to these questions and more from a linguist!


Poe’s Shadows, an immersive theatrical installation

Meaghan Dee, Amanda Nelson, Todd Ogle, Ashley Reed, Natasha Staley, Tanner Upthegrove, Ethan Candelario
With additional contributions from students from SOPA, SOVA, and ARIES.

Time: 2:00-5:30 p.m.
Location: Moss Arts Center, Sandbox and Perform Studio

Drawing from two of Edgar Allan Poe’s most well-known works, “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Raven,” the installation explores what happens when literary texts are lifted from the “page to the stage” and then reimagined through the use of new technology. Inspired by Poe’s texts themselves, crankies (a 19th century artform in which a long, illustrated scroll is wound, revealing imagery related to spoken stories or songs), and shadow play (or puppetry), this installation explores the concept of shadow through text, image, and sound, including recordings of Virginia Tech students reading Poe's works.

Stop by at any point during the timeframe to experience the 15-minute looping display. 


Keynote: From Jail to Yale: Education is Humanization in the Carceral Context and Beyond

George Chochos

Time: 6:00 p.m.
Location: Haymarket Theatre

"From Jail to Yale: Education is Humanization in the Carceral Context and Beyond" will focus on prison education initiatives and the power of a humanities education.


What Humans Can Do but AI’s Can’t: How AI Can Fuel a Renaissance in Jobs for Humanities Majors

Lee M. Pierson

Time: 12:00 p.m.
Location: Liberal Arts and Human Sciences Building, Ground Floor Conference Room

Bachelor’s degrees conferred by Virginia colleges in English, History, and Philosophy have declined by more than a third from the 2011-12 academic year to the 2012-22 academic year. (State Council of Higher Education). A likely factor in this decline is the perceived lesser availability of higher-paying jobs as compared to many other majors, especially those in STEM fields. Paradoxically, though, the recent rise of generative AI technology creates new and exciting employment opportunities for students in the humanities, including but not limited to “prompt engineer.” There is a need for human partners to manage and fact-check AI systems. This need is not going away soon, if ever.  Generative AI—despite its recent impressive achievements—is notoriously prone to errors, biases, and hallucinations, as well as to excessively second-handed inside-the-box “thinking” that misses creative possibilities. Why? Because an AI program cannot override itself to correct its missteps. Unlike AI’s, humans can override their faulty programming, especially by challenging the faulty assumptions that make bad critical thinking and break good creative thinking. This skill of overriding assumptions will be demonstrated interactively in this session.


Conceptual Solutions with the Innovation Collab

LAHS 3984 Students

Time: 2:00-3:15 p.m.
Location: Newman Library Room 101 (Goodall Room)

LAHS 3984 Innovation Collab is a project-based class focused on guiding students to develop skills in technological innovation with an emphasis on public interest technology. Students work together to develop solutions to real-world problems provided by partners in industry (with Boeing partnership) and nonprofits.  

Students will present their conceptual solutions related to the broad project areas of Electrifying Air Travel, Collaborative Autonomy, Environment & Sustainability, and Healthy Travel. The assignment focused on enabling technology with regard to inclusivity and access for specifically identified public stakeholder groups.


Poe’s Shadows, an immersive theatrical installation

Meaghan Dee, Amanda Nelson, Todd Ogle, Ashley Reed, Natasha Staley, Tanner Upthegrove, Ethan Candelario
With additional contributions from students from SOPA, SOVA, and ARIES.

Time: 12:00-2:00 p.m.
Location: Moss Arts Center, Sandbox and Perform Studio

Drawing from two of Edgar Allan Poe’s most well-known works, “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Raven,” the installation explores what happens when literary texts are lifted from the “page to the stage” and then reimagined through the use of new technology. Inspired by Poe’s texts themselves, crankies (a 19th century artform in which a long, illustrated scroll is wound, revealing imagery related to spoken stories or songs), and shadow play (or puppetry), this installation explores the concept of shadow through text, image, and sound, including recordings of Virginia Tech students reading Poe's works.

Stop by at any point during the timeframe to experience the 15-minute looping display. 


Speed Solving Not Getting Away with Murder

Shoshana Milgram Knapp

Time: 12:00 p.m.
Location: 370/380 Shanks Hall and Zoom (link distributed to guests who register for the week)

Sometimes, in a matter of minutes, we can find our way to the core of a conundrum, finding out the facts that a criminal has tried to hide.  

In this interactive session, we will work, individually or in teams, to solve a number of concise puzzles, matching wits with (fictional) criminals. The stories are invented, but plausible.  Our puzzle stories—according to the former warden of Sing Sing Prison—"represent a very adequate cross-section of the problems perennially confronting the law-enforcers.”


The Digital Witch Hunt

Hannah Steinhauer, Corry Higgs, and Michael Senters

Time: 1:00 p.m.
Location: 132 Lane Hall

Examining the rhetoric and imagery of feminism, queerness, and witches in online spaces, across the political spectrum, we use iconographic tracking and visual rhetorical analysis to analyze how these various groups utilize imagery to stake their positions— with special attention to the imagery and rhetoric of witches, witchcraft, and queer-cryptid icons.  

As students in an interdisciplinary Ph.D. program who research various issues of social media rhetoric, this research utilizes our respective training in political science, gender studies, communication, Appalachian studies, and technology studies to gain a clearer picture of the role of social media discourse around the “queer” and the “demonized.” Join us and become bewitched.


Tea and Bannock from the VT Indigenous Friendship Garden: Harvest Celebration

Mae Hey

Time: 2:00-4:00 p.m.
Location: Shadow Lake Village Community House (1741 Ginger Lane)

Come by and enjoy a variety of foraged teas and bannock (breads) made from the Native Corn we grow in the friendship garden. We will offer samples from foraged plants as toppings for the bannock. We will have additional activities set up to learn about the ingredients involved, help us save seeds for next year's garden, and process acorns for upcoming tasting events.


Poe’s Shadows, an immersive theatrical installation

Meaghan Dee, Amanda Nelson, Todd Ogle, Ashley Reed, Natasha Staley, Tanner Upthegrove, Ethan Candelario
With additional contributions from students from SOPA, SOVA, and ARIES.

Time: 2:00-7:30 p.m.
Location: Moss Arts Center, Sandbox and Perform Studio

Drawing from two of Edgar Allan Poe’s most well-known works, “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Raven,” the installation explores what happens when literary texts are lifted from the “page to the stage” and then reimagined through the use of new technology. Inspired by Poe’s texts themselves, crankies (a 19th century artform in which a long, illustrated scroll is wound, revealing imagery related to spoken stories or songs), and shadow play (or puppetry), this installation explores the concept of shadow through text, image, and sound, including recordings of Virginia Tech students reading Poe's works.

Stop by at any point during the timeframe to experience the 15-minute looping display.