This month’s academic events include a dialogue on the use of police force, “hidden history” tours of campus, and a round table on free speech in the age of new media.
WHAT: Film Screening: 1916: A Terrible Beauty
WHEN: October 2 at 1:30 p.m.
WHERE: Spurlock Museum
ABOUT: A Terrible Beauty / Áille an Uafáis is a 90 minute feature docudrama which takes a unique look at the events of Easter Week 1916 in Dublin. This is the first film to tell the story from both the Irish and British perspective, showing the human cost of the fighting on both sides. Made by world renowned history filmmakers Tile Films, it premiered at the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival in 2013, had its broadcast debut on Irish language channel TG4 in April 2014 and has since been showing at select theatres in Ireland and the UK to much acclaim.
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WHAT: Lecture: Prof. Jose Hualde: “Canadian Raising in Chicagoland: On the Historical Development of Marginal Contrasts”
WHEN: October 3 at 4 p.m.
WHERE: Lucy Ellis Lounge, 1080 FLB
ABOUT: While in many US English varieties words like writer and rider are homophones because of the systematic flapping of the coronal stop, in other North American varieties where flapping is also systematic, these words are realized with different diphthongs. In particular, the diphthong has a higher nucleus before voiceless consonants and also before a flapped /t/. The phenomenon is known as Canadian Raising, as it was first described for Canadian English. In this presentation, Hualde will report on production and perception studies designed to elucidate the nature of this phenomenon in the speech of a group of young speakers from the Chicago area.
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WHAT: Lecture: Graciane Daniela Sebrão: “The Education of Afro-Brazilians in the Last Decades of Slavery: Santa Catarina, 1850-1889”
WHEN: October 4 at 2 p.m.
WHERE: International Studies Building Room 232
ABOUT: This event is sponsored by the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS).
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WHAT: “Northeast by Southeast: A Night of Brazilian Regional Music” with Don Pandeiro and Di Freitas
WHEN: October 6 at 7 p.m.
WHERE: Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum, 600 S. Gregory St., Urbana
ABOUT: Don Pandeiro and Di Freitas are performers, artisans, and instrument builders who represent two different Brazilian contexts and musical styles: urban and rural, Southeast and Northeast, and samba and música nordestina. This event will showcase the unique combination of musical talent and instrument-making abilities of these two Musicians in Residence.
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WHAT: Lecture: Craig Futterman: “The Legitimate Use of Police Force? A Dialogue of Law and Practice”
WHEN: IPRH Lecture Hall, Levis Faculty Center, Fourth Floor (919 West Illinois Street, Urbana, IL)
WHERE: October 6 at 7:30 p.m.
ABOUT: The use of force is at the core of policing in America, which operates in the context of an armed population, chronic violence, and a historical legacy of racialized inequality. Recent events have pushed the intersection of police and race to the center of public debate. Finding ways to make police powers accountable to our aspirations for a political system organized by effective guarantees of civil and human rights is one of the great challenges of this historical moment. This event brings into dialogue Craig Futterman and Michael Schlosser, two experts with different perspectives on the problem. Commenting on these perspectives is Helen A. Neville, Professor of Educational Pyschology and African American Studies. A discussion with the audience will follow.
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WHAT: “Hidden Histories” Campus Tours
WHEN: October 10 at 5 p.m.
WHERE: All tours start from the Quad side of Henry Admin building
ABOUT: This tour is a project of a “research cluster” on public history, funded by the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities and convened by students and faculty from a range of departments at UIUC and history practitioners from the broader community. We are inspired to explore the forms of public meaning-making that shape our own campus spaces, and that shape the relationship between our university and the publics it was founded to serve. Our goal is to explore, document, and promote hidden and forgotten stories and persons connected to our campus and the wider Champaign-Urbana community. Sites include the School of Labor and Employment Relations, the original site of La Cultural Latina, Coble Hall, Illini Union, The Quad, the Main Library an the Cultural Centers on Nevada Street.
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WHAT: Latina/Latino Studies Fall Colloquium Series: “High-Risk Citizenship: ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,’ Criminal Exposure, and Queer Belonging in Michael Nava’s The Death of Friends”
WHEN: October 12 at 3:30 p.m.
WHERE: Department of Latina/Latino Studies, 1207 West Oregon Street, Room 103, Urbana
ABOUT: The end of the 20th century ushered an unprecedented public debate that spoke openly about queer identity, departing from previous vague descriptions of queer communities. The consequent institutionalization of criminal exposure laws that sought to protect citizens from sexual contact with people living with HIV, the infamous “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” and the recently repealed Defense of Marriage Act underscore the national interest in determining the conditions under which a person’s public identification as queer was legally sanctioned. Collectively, these statutes defined queer people as high-risk subjects, sexually, militarily, and morally threatening the livelihood of citizens and U.S. national security. Bringing together legal and literary critique, José A. de la Garza Valenzuela interrogates the interest in citizenship in contemporary social advocacy through a critical analysis of gay Chicano writer Michael Nava’s The Death of Friends. The 1996 novel offers a unique insight into how queer communities made sense of their own public criminalized identities following the U.S. neglect of HIV/AIDS treatments and restrictions on military service for queer citizens. Nava, de la Garza Valenzuela argues, is less concerned with challenging the notion of minoritized communities as high-risk communities and instead depicts the procurement of citizenship as a high-risk cultural enterprise.
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WHAT: Lecture: “Four Women and One Robot”
WHEN: October 13 at 7:30 p.m.
WHERE: Levis Faculty Center, Third Floor main lecture hall (919 West Illinois Street, Urbana, IL)
ABOUT: Through the stories of four women and one robot this talk situates blackness as an absented presence in the field of surveillance studies, and questions how a realization of the conditions of blackness—the historical, the present, and the historical present— can help social theorists understand our contemporary conditions of surveillance.
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WHAT: Lecture: “Unsettling Terrains: Theory, Embodiment, and Praxis”
WHEN: October 18 at 5:15 p.m.
WHERE: 1002 Lincoln Hall
ABOUT: This talk is by Mishuana Goeman of UCLA.
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WHAT: Yiddish and Hebrew Film Series: “The Cantor’s Son”
WHEN: October 19 at 5 p.m.
WHERE: 109 English Building
ABOUT: A musical about a wayward youth who makes his way from his Polish shtetl to New York’s Lower East Side.
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WHAT: Lecture: “Freedom of Speech in the Age of New Media and New Publics: France, Europe and Beyond”
WHEN: October 21 at 3 p.m.
WHERE: Levis Faculty Center, 3rd Floor
ABOUT: Roundtable participants for this event include Ms. Rokhaya Diallo (Journalist & Filmmaker), Prof. Federico Tarragoni (Paris VII), and Prof. Christian Lequesne (Sciences Politique-Centre de Recherches Internationales).
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WHAT: Lecture: “Retrofitting Totalitarianism in Putin’s Russia”
WHEN: October 25 at 4 p.m.
WHERE: Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum
ABOUT: This lecture will be delivered by Masha Gessen.
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We live near a major university and a community college. There are smart people that come here every week to talk to the general public about interesting topics. Here’s a sampling of the talks and events you can find in the not-so-ivy-covered buildings near you. These events are free and will fill your brain with yummy knowledge (and sometimes will fill your stomach with free eats).