Library Brown Bag Talks will be offered via Zoom during the Spring 2022 semester. An email will be sent to the UNC Asheville community during the week of the talk with information about logging into Zoom.
All Library Brown Bags are free and open to UNC Asheville students, faculty, and staff. Several select Brown Bags will be open to the larger community and will require registration.
For questions or comments about Library Brown Bag Talks, please contact Gene Hyde, Head of Special Collections and University Archivist, UNC Asheville. ghyde@unca.edu or 828-251-6645.
Thursday, January 27
12 - 1 PM
Via Zoom - login information will be sent via email a few days before the talk
Jessica Pisano, First-Year Writing Coordinator
"Connecting Town and Gown in the Time of COVID: A High School-University Partnership Goes Virtual"
In Spring 2020, just before the COVID-19 pandemic, first-year writing students at UNC Asheville began tutoring at Asheville High School’s emerging Writing Center, a center dedicated to providing a welcome community and academic support to a diverse student body at no cost. When both schools moved to remote learning in March, UNCA’s First-Year Writing Coordinator Jessica Pisano and AHS’s Writing Center Director Amanda Galvin reworked the collaboration. Since then, they’ve been pairing high school students with first-year college students for virtual coaching sessions every semester. Come find out more about a university-community partnership that not only provides writing support and mentoring for local high school students, but also gives our students opportunities to develop interpersonal communication and apply the writing skills they learn in LANG 120!
Thursday, February 10
12 - 1 PM
Via Zoom - login information will be sent via email a few days before the talk
Amanda Maxwell, Pre-Health Advisor & Committee Coordinator
"Advising for Advisors of Pre-Health Students: Resources and Opportunities at UNCA"
Before you schedule your student advising sessions in March, come learn about important information to support the success of your aspiring healthcare professionals. Pre-Health Professions Advisory Committee members' goal is to support your students' *successful* application to health-related graduate programs. We want to do this in collaboration with you and your department's majors and minors advising. In this session, we will talk about key pre-health resources, best practices, UNCA-specific opportunities, and next steps for your students as well as ways in which your advising efforts can be made more efficient. Information (and hopefully a representative) will also be available to help you learn more about UNCA's new joint MPH degree with UNC.
Thursday, February 17
12 - 1 PM
Via Zoom - login information will be sent via email a few days before the talk
Joshua D. Vadeboncoeur, Management and Accountancy
"Do Black Fans Matter? Deconstructing Racialized Experience and Movement within NASCAR Spaces"
This presentation explores and defines Black individuals’ racialized experiences and movements as NASCAR fans from their perspective, demonstrating how Black fans shift the otherwise oppressive geographies of NASCAR into sites of belongingness, celebration, and enjoyment.
Thursday, February 24
12 - 1 PM
Via Zoom - login information will be sent via email a few days before the talk
Blu Buchanon, Sociology & Anthropology
"The Powerful as Victims: Multicultural White Supremacy and Gay White Men"
Drawing from Buchanan's forthcoming article "Gay Neo-Nazis in the United States: Victimhood, Masculinity, and the Public/Private Spheres," this Brown Bag talk will explore the transformation of white supremacy following the Civil Rights era and the efforts by gay white men to situate themselves within this larger project. Key to this transformation is the role of grievances and victimhood narratives - whose harm counts? We'll be discussing how harm narratives are constructed and how these narratives are deployed to shift stigma, defuse counter-claims, and reinforce systems of power.
Thursday, March 3
12 - 1 PM
Via Zoom - login information will be sent via email a few days before the talk
Tracey Rizzo, Dean of Humanities
"Best Practices in Selecting Course Materials"
Join colleagues from every division who have experimented with innovative methods for providing students with affordable and accessible course materials. In addition to hearing faculty and student perspectives, we will also be joined by staff from the book store, financial aid, and the library.
Thursday, March 17
12 - 1 PM
Via Zoom - login information will be sent via email a few days before the talk
Kelly Biers, Language and Literatures
"Community-driven language preservation and the development of a Wisconsin Walloon primer"
In this talk, I'll discuss the development of a linguistic introduction to Wisconsin Walloon, an endangered heritage variety of a Romance language that is itself threatened in Belgium. I will provide an overview of the book as well as the community-engaged work leading up to its development. This includes several workshops on identifying goals, creating an orthography for this exclusively oral language, and collecting data.
Thursday, March 24
12 - 1 PM
Via Zoom - login information will be sent via email a few days before the talk
Dustin Evatt-Young, Director of Highsmith Student Union
"Examining Whiteness and Anti-Racist Leadership in Higher Education"
This session will explore the often unquestioned white norms that exist within higher education. Stemming from original research, we will discuss the five archetypes, or white scripts, that highlight how White leaders navigate, challenge, and/or reinforce racial inequities and whiteness in higher education. Attendees will leave with new ideas and strategies to make personal transformative changes and engage in anti-racist practices at UNC Asheville.
Thursday, March 31
12 - 1 PM
Via Zoom - login information will be sent via email a few days before the talk
Rachel Hanson, English
"From Literary Nonfiction to Fiction: the Role of Research in Creative Writing"
A talk on the ways in which a literary nonfiction essay on wildlife in the Grand Canyon shifted to a literary fiction novel on foster sisters in Appalachia, the research that streamlined the process, and the ways in which the research continues to play a major role in the novel-in-progress project.
Thursday, April 14
12 - 1 PM
Via Zoom - login information will be sent via email a few days before the talk
Jessica Casimir-Vadeboncoeur, Sociology & Anthropology
"Stress Processes in the Health Outcomes of Grandmother Caregivers in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa"
The objective of this presentation is to discuss the life histories of the older women in order to explore the various “pathways to parenthood” which led them to become the custodial guardians of their grandchildren. Each household represented in the sample had varying numbers of grandchildren which ranged from two to eight grandchildren with a median number of four grandchildren per family. Out of the eighteen participants interviewed, the data revealed three key themes which highlighted the role transition from grandmother to surrogate mother. These included the following: (1) deceased adult children who left behind their kin to their parents, (2) grandchildren who were abandoned by their parents and as a result, lacked regular contact with them, and (3) adult children who transferred guardianship to their parents due to inability to parent as a result of cultural or socioeconomic factors. Within the third theme, two sub-themes were observed which highlighted accounts of grandmother caregiving outside the normative boundaries of parental loss through. These categories included adult children who were employed in neighboring municipalities or outside the metropolitan city of Durban and contributed child support as a result of their parent’s assistance and grandmothers who willingly petitioned for legal guardianship either due to social reasons or financial assistance.
Thursday, April 21
12 - 1 PM
Via Zoom - login information will be sent via email a few days before the talk
Sonya DiPalma, Mass Communication
"Hope Lange: Celebrity Activism and the Homeless European Land Project "
"Hope Lange: Celebrity Activism and the Homeless European Land Project" explores the intersection of Hope Lange’s early acting career, the Golden Age of Television and Film and the campaign to 'save' refugees in Italy between 1956-1960.