Ramsey Library at UNC Asheville: Events & Exhibits: Fall 2018 Brown Bag Talks

Inclusive Education in Ghana: Practices and Teacher Perspectives in the Central Region

Thursday, August 30

12 - 1 PM

Ramsey Library Special Collections

Tiece Ruffin, Department of Education

"Inclusive Education in Ghana: Practices and Teacher Perspectives in the Central Region"

My Brown Bag will discuss my 10 month Fulbright grant award to Ghana, focusing on my teaching, service, and research. I’ll discuss co-teaching graduate and undergraduate courses at the University of Education Winneba with colleagues in UEWs Department of Special Education, where I had the pleasure of working with a total of one hundred fifty-nine (159) intelligent and hard working students! I’ll discuss my experiences serving on a UEW committee on Internationalization, participating in Ghana’s Third National Curriculum Writing Workshop to Reform Teacher Education, and co-organizing a collaborative program between the departments of basic education and special education on the use of children’s literature to foster inclusivity in basic schools. I also served as a keynote and featured speaker for various workshops and programs, and my scholarly and research activities centered on inclusive education via collaborative and independent research activities.

R^3: Re-enter, Re-write, Re-create

Thursday, September 13

12 - 1 PM

Ramsey Library Special Collections

Patrick Bahls, Honors Program

"R^3: Re-enter, Re-write, Re-create"

Recently, UNC Asheville has begun a number of collaborations with currently and formerly incarcerated citizens of our region. In the late fall of 2017, one such collaboration, brought several faculty, staff, and students together with a number of formerly incarcerated community members sponsored by the Buncombe County Reentry Council to read Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow and discuss their thoughts on the book. The conversations in this group offered an incredible learning experience for all participants and served as the inspiration for a new program that will begin this fall. R^3: Re-enter, Re-write, Re-Create will offer members of the UNC Asheville community to engage with and subsequently reflect on a common text alongside currently and formerly incarcerated folks across our state. The resulting reflections will be gathered in an edited volume showcasing the wide variety of perspectives represented by program participants. This brown bag will give an overview of this proposed program and invite attendees to play a part in it.

ᏚᏗᏱᏧᎾᏕᎶᏆᏍᏗᎢ ᎤᏂᏃᎮᎸᏅᎢ - Stories of the Snowbird Day School.

Thursday, September 20

12 - 1 PM

Ramsey Library Special Collections

Trey Adcock, American Indian and Indigenous Studies

"ᏚᏗᏱᏧᎾᏕᎶᏆᏍᏗᎢ ᎤᏂᏃᎮᎸᏅᎢ - Stories of the Snowbird Day School"

Trey Adcock will be presenting a publicly engaged project he has been working on entitled ᏚᏗᏱᏧᎾᏕᎶᏆᏍᏗᎢ ᎤᏂᏃᎮᎸᏅᎢ (“Tuti Tsunadelogwasdi Uninohelv”) or Stories of the Snowbird Day School. This project seeks to preserve the historical artifacts, language and stories of the students who attended the Snowbird Day School on Tuti yi, “Snowbird,” Reservation lands. The project is a collaboration between the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, Snowbird Community Library, and UNC Asheville. Trey will provide an overview of the projects goals, the materials that have been collected thus far, student work on the project and will discuss future directions. He seeks input and inquiry from audience members.

Modeling Neuroanatomic Propagation of ALS in the Spinal Cord

Thursday, September 27

12 - 1 PM

Ramsey Library Special Collections

Brian Drawert, Computer Science

"Modeling Neuroanatomic Propagation of ALS in the Spinal Cord"

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that affects motor neurons in the brain and the spinal cord. The progressive degeneration of motor neurons in the spinal cord causes patients to lose their ability to control their muscle movement. As the disease progresses they lose the ability to move their limbs, speak, eat, and eventually breath, leading to death. It is the most lethal of the common neurodegenerative disorders, and has thus far been refractory to all treatments. Recent hypotheses of ALS progression have posited a point-source origin of motor neuron death with neuroanatomic propagation either contiguously to adjacent regions, or along networks via axonal and synaptic connections. Although the molecular mechanisms of propagation are unknown, one leading hypothesis is a "prion-like" spread of misfolded and aggregated proteins.

To better understand this devastating disease, we are developing a cellular and molecular scale computational model of the spread of ALS within the spinal cord. We parametrized our stochastic reaction-diffusion SIR style model by reconstructing human spinal cord from high-resolution magnetic resonance (MR) images and known gross and histological neuroanatomy. Our model appears to realistically recapitulate the clinical and pathological spread of ALS in human spinal cord. We are using the model combined with clinical assessment data to quantify and characterize the cellular and molecular spread of ALS, predict the relative contributions of network and contiguous spread, and attempt to explain the differential cellular vulnerability to the disease.

What makes a great internship?

Thursday, October 11

12 - 1 PM

Ramsey Library Special Collections

Lisa Tandan, Career Center

"What makes a great internship?"

Lisa Tandan, Director of the Career Center, will discuss internships for UNCA students. You'll learn about the difference between internships for academic credit and not for academic credit. It will also cover the difference between an internship and a part-time job, and give advice on how to get the most out of an internship experience.

Science meets Buddhism: Teaching Physics to Tibetan Monks

Thursday, October 18

12 - 1 PM

Ramsey Library Special Collections

Judy Beck and Paula Willis, Department of Physics

Mahmut Reyhanoglu - Engineering

Jerome Hay - Suds Associates Consulting Engineers

"Science meets Buddhism: Teaching Physics to Tibetan Monks"

The Emory-Tibet Science Initiative (ETSI) was founded to create a comprehensive and sustainable science education program for the Tibetan Buddhist monastic universities. As envisioned by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, the program has the ultimate goal of providing a bridge between two complementary systems of knowledge, and encouraging both scientists and Buddhist monastics to explore the convergence of these fields and learn from and with each other. In this talk, Paula Willis, Mahmut Reyhanoglu, Judy Beck, and Jerome Hay will discuss the program and share stories of lively conversations, engaging cultural exchanges, and unexpected insights gained while exploring physics with monks.

Making Noise, an interactive guide to War of the Worlds on the 80th anniversary

Thursday, October 25

12 - 1 PM

Ramsey Library Special Collections

Rob Berls, Department of Drama

"Making Noise, an interactive guide to War of the Worlds on the 80th anniversary"

This Brown Bag will take the participant through the amazing world of radio foley sound. We will work through the process of how the UNC Asheville production of War of the Worlds developed the sounds for the radio play that took place in September. Come in for a hands on historical survey of how sounds are actually made for theatre. Audience participation is encouraged.

You Are Guardians of the UNC Asheville Brand Galaxy!

Thursday, November 8

12 - 1 PM

Ramsey Library Special Collections

November 8

Sarah Broberg, Communication and Marketing

"You Are Guardians of the UNC Asheville Brand Galaxy!"

Join the UNC Asheville Communication & Marketing team for an engaging, interactive discussion about the valuable role each member of our campus community plays as Guardians of the UNC Asheville Brand Galaxy. Join the C&M team for an intergalactic odyssey with stops at exotic destinations including communication, marketing, branding and content development. Explore territories often uncharted including social media optimization, Facebook campaigns and analytics. Meet new galactic friends and reconnect with familiar faces such as key messages, press releases, photo opps, and media requests. Join your fellow UNC Asheville Brand Guardians to share your insights and ideas for the benefit of the Galaxy!

Supporting our Heroes: PTSD in Firefighters

Thursday, November 15

12 - 1 PM

Ramsey Library Special Collections

Evelyn Chiang, Department of Psychology

Keith Cox, Department of Psychology

Kevin Riordan, Research Assistant

"Supporting our Heroes: PTSD in Firefighters"

Although PTSD is typically thought to stem from the experience of a single traumatic incident, the cumulative effects of exposure to many smaller events may also cause PTSD symptoms. This may be particularly likely in populations of first responders, such as firefighters, who are continuously exposed to numerous incidents that involve harm, suffering, and death. For example, in any given shift, firefighters respond to calls that involve vehicular accidents, drug overdoses, assaults, and the like. In this collaborative study with Joy Ponder (Division Chief) and Chris Johnson of the Asheville Fire Department, we examined self-reports of PTSD symptoms, coping behaviors, addictive behaviors, and barriers to seeking help.

Vagrant Virtue: Reading Charity in Early Modern England

***** Evan Gurney's Brown Bag Talk has been postponed until January 24, 2019 ****

Thursday, November 29

12 - 1 PM

Ramsey Library Special Collections

Evan Gurney, Department of English

"Vagrant Virtue: Reading Charity in Early Modern England"

Evan Gurney will present work from his new book, Love’s Quarrels: Reading Charity in Early Modern England, which explores overlaps between the landscape of poverty and social dislocation in early modern England, the period’s emergent laws that criminalized itinerant poverty, and a new popular genre of literature that purported to reveal the schemes and guises of wandering vagrants who weren’t placed in a settled location or occupation. These “masterless men and women,” as they were called, acquired a symbolic power in the cultural landscape, and their reputed capacity for persuasion and disguise offered a stand-in for larger cultural anxieties about the instability of language and unreliability of appearance. Vagrancy worried and fascinated contemporaries even as it offered them a touchstone for the interpretive pressures of reading, giving, and living charitably.