Thursday, September 8
12 - 1 PM
Ramsey Library Special Collections
Sam Kaplan, Department of Mathematics
Marvelous Math Club: join us as Sam Kaplan discusses math literacy week and the community outreach the math department is doing with public housing.
Thursday, September 15
12 - 1 PM
Ramsey Library Special Collections
Evan Couzo, Department of Education
Join Evan Couzo as he discusses his recent publication, "Modeled response of ozone to electricity generation emissions in the northeastern United States using three sensitivity techniques," published in the Journal of the Air & Waste Management Association.
Abstract:
Electrical generation units (EGUs) are important sources of nitrogen oxides (NOx) that contribute to ozone air pollution. A dynamic management system can anticipate high ozone and dispatch EGU generation on a daily basis to attempt to avoid violations, temporarily scaling back or shutting down EGUs that most influence the high ozone while compensating for that generation elsewhere. Here we investigate the contributions of NOx from individual EGUs to high daily ozone, with the goal of informing the design of a dynamic management system.
Dynamic management of electrical generation has the potential to meet daily ozone air quality standards at low cost. We show that dynamic management can be effective at reducing ozone, as EGU contributions are important and as the number of EGUs that contribute to high ozone in a given location is small (<6). For two high ozone days and seven geographic regions, EGUs would best be shut down or their production scaled back roughly 1.5 days before the forecasted exceedance. Including online sensitivity techniques in an air quality forecasting model can provide timely and useful information on which EGUs would be most beneficial to shut down or scale back temporarily.
Thursday, September 22
12 - 1 PM
Ramsey Library Special Collections
Juan Sanchez Martinez, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures
Linguistic experimentation—the efforts in exploring other epistemologies while switching the codes—and the holistic methodology, braiding science, art, and spirituality, are some features of contemporary indigenous expressions which are questioning the canonical literatures of English, Spanish and French. Similarly, the project of using native concepts in critical reading, borrowed from indigenous languages and ontologies, is currently challenging education in the Humanities, which once offered unambiguous definitions for writing and for literature. In this talk, we will discuss about the contributions of the last issue of the Diálogo magazine, "The five cardinal points in contemporary indigenous literatures” (19.1. Spring 2016).
Thursday, September 29
12 - 1 PM
Ramsey Library Special Collections
Graham Reynolds, Department of Biology
Join Graham Reynolds as he discusses the expedition that led to the discovery of a new species of boa in a remote part of the Bahamas.
Thursday, October 6
12 - 1 PM
Ramsey Library Special Collections
Billy Schumann, Director of the Center for Appalachian Studies at Appalachian State University
Dr. William Schumann has taught and conducted research in Appalachia's southern, central, and northern sub-regions. Based on this experience, he will discuss strategies for engaging with Appalachian communities to develop community-based resources in partnership with universities and other stakeholders. In particular, Dr. Schumann will provide examples of successful student-led research projects as well as highlight the challenges to inclusive, sustainable community development in Appalachia.
Dr. Schumann will also discuss graduate opportunities in the Appalachian Studies program at ASU.
Thursday, October 13
12 - 1 PM
Ramsey Library Special Collections
Tracey Rizzo (Department of History), Marquis McGee (Advising and Learning Support), and Asia Sheppard (Advising and Learning Support)
This panel will explore the impact of alumni support for ALANA and first-generation college students-in-transition at the University of North Carolina at Asheville (UNCA). ALANA and/or first generation students themselves, the panelists have been active in implementing a variety of strategies that have successfully supported traditionally underserved populations, including pell-eligible students. As we describe these strategies--which range from enhanced advising and mentoring to special sections of the first-year colloquium--we will highlight the role of alumni who work as professional educators full time or as occasional consultants at their alma maters.
Thursday, October 20
12 - 1 PM
Ramsey Library Special Collections
Robert Bowen, Department of Drama
This talk will focus on the process taken to create the production of Marat/Sade; from the reasons why this production was chosen to the collaborative efforts of the creative team, cast and crew, and the expectations for opening night.
Thursday, October 27
12 - 1 PM
Ramsey Library Special Collections
Grace Campbell, Humanities Program
Grace Campbell will discuss the basic ideas in a paper she will present in 2017 on positivist legal theory, a branch of analytic jurisprudence. Analytic legal philosophy seeks to explain what law is and why those subject to it have an obligation to obey. Such simple questions are increasingly complicated by the global diversity of legal systems. The sheer variety of legal concepts poses new line-drawing challenges in the attempt to distinguish law from non-law.
The Planning Thesis, a version of exclusive legal positivism, makes a radical departure from well-known natural law theories in demarcating what law is and is not. While law can sometimes track morality, there is no necessary connection between the legal and the moral. Instead, legality is strictly social planning we have accepted for the purpose of solving coordination problems. Introduced in 2010, the planning view and is now advanced by top legal theory centers at Yale and Oxford. In the brown bag conversation Grace will share her argument against the planning view and explain how it fails to solve the “normativity problem” in law.
Thursday, November 10
12 - 1 PM
Ramsey Library Special Collections
Keya Maitra, Department of Philosophy
Sultana’s Dream: Feminist Consciousness through a Bengali Muslim Lens
Abstract:
At least 10 years before Charlotte Perkins Gilman publishes Herland--often considered the first feminist utopian writing within Western feminist context, Rokeya Sekhawat Hossain-- a Bengali Muslim woman—published Sultana’s Dream in 1905. Targeting the purdah & zenana faced by women of late 19th and early 20th century Bengal, Rokeya imagines the utopian place of Ladyland that her main character Sultana encounters in her dream. Countering her male dominated society, Rokeya conceives Ladyland as “a technologically advanced world where men are confined to the zenana & women guarantee complete freedom.” The general goal of my paper is to explore how Rokeya’s utopian science fiction can be considered a feminist text.
Drawing from Sandra Bartky’s 1995 article “Toward a Phenomenology of Feminist Consciousness,” we can identify three features of feminist consciousness: (1) feminist consciousness is transformative since it effects a shift in a woman’s cognitive, emotional and physical behavior; (2) it is at least partially liberatory, because it establishes change and liberation as real goals; and (3) in its active moral dimension, it can be taken as not merely self-directed but essentially other and world-directed. Therefore, an awareness of the powers and structures that have worked to limit women is at the heart of feminist consciousness. Further, as Bartky observes, it allows feminists to understand what they are and where they are “in the light of what [they] are not yet.” My working conclusion is that Sultana’s Dream reflects strong representation of these three features of feminist consciousness: transformative, liberatory in its goals and aimed at changing the wider structure of social reality. Rokeya’s portrayal of women and their empowerment in Ladyland does come to represent feminist consciousness. Indeed, it thus reflects strong ‘feminist sentiments’ growing from ‘indigenous roots.’
POSTPONED UNTIL JANUARY 2017
Thursday, November 17
12 - 1 PM
Ramsey Library Special Collections
Brent Skidmore, Department of Art and Art History
Join Brent Skidmore for a discussion on UNCA's new STEAM studio @ the RAMP. He will will give an introduction to the team's work and provide updates on faculty developments.