It might not seem like it, but spring (and spring break) are just around the corner. Here are a dozen academic events happening in our area as things start to warm up this month.
WHAT: Community Cinema: Illinois Public Media/Independent Television Services Documentary Film Series: The Trials of Muhammad Ali
WHEN: March 4th at 7 p.m.
WHERE: Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum, 600 S. Gregory St., Urbana
ABOUT: The Trials of Muhammad Ali covers the famed boxer’s toughest bout of all: his battle to overturn the five-year prison sentence he received for refusing U.S. military service. The film explores Ali’s exile years when he was banned from boxing and found himself in the crosshairs of conflicts concerning race, religion, and wartime dissent.
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WHAT: Body/Bodies Series Lecture: “The Sovereignty of the Senses” by Ann Cvetkovich
WHEN: March 6th at 4 p.m.
WHERE: Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum, 600 S. Gregory St., Urbana
ABOUT: Ann Cvetkovich is Ellen Clayton Garwood Centennial Professor of English and Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism (Rutgers, 1992); An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Duke, 2003); and Depression: A Public Feeling (Duke, 2012). Her current writing projects focus on the current state of LGBTQ archives and the creative use of them by artists to create counterarchives and interventions in public history.
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WHAT: ECE Colloquium: “The Big Data Revolution”
WHEN: March 6th at 4 p.m.
WHERE: 151 Everitt Lab
ABOUT: Big Data technology is enabling incredible new business opportunities and cost savings for enterprises. These powerful new techniques require radical changes to existing data management architectures and novel approaches for data analytics. In this presentation, I will discuss some of the new architectural patterns for Big Data and innovative use cases IBM has addressed with Big Data technology. One of the most exciting topics in Big Data is the rapidly emerging field of stream computing that enables continuous in-memory processing of vast quantities of data with low latency. Streaming technology gives developers the freedom to perform computations naturally as data arrives versus being forced into the traditional store and process approaches. At IBM, our research and development teams have worked for nearly a decade to create a stream computing platform that is extremely fast, efficient, and agile for developers. I will describe how it works and what makes it so compelling. Finally, I’ll talk about the challenges and opportunities we see over the next several years in Big Data.
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WHAT: Lecture: “On Normative Dualism: Some Preliminary Thoughts on Chinese Approaches to Order and Disorder”
WHEN: March 11th at 4 p.m.
WHERE: 912 West Illinois Street, Urbana
ABOUT: Using one system of norms to positively maintain order but another system of norms to negatively punish disorder is a characteristic, if not unique, Chinese experience. This can be described as normative dualism. This paper discusses this perennial feature of the Chinese normative systems by examining its phenomenological attributes which separates “Li” from “Xing” and its more profound philosophical foundation of dialecticism that distinguishes Yin from Yang, the positive from the negative and morality from punishment.
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WHAT: European Movie Night: Štěstí (Something Like Happiness) – Czech Republic
WHEN: March 11th at 6:30
WHERE: Lucy Ellis Lounge, 1080 Foreign Language Building
ABOUT: A trio of friends residing in an urban Czech housing project finds that happiness can come from the place where you least expect it in this quirky and heartfelt drama from Wild Bees director Bohdan Sláma. As the shadow of the country’s largest chemical factory looms large over their bleak industrial suburb, Monika (Tatiana Vilhelmová), Tonik (Pavel Liska), and Dasha (Anna Geislerová) hold out hope for a brighter future in another place. In Czech with English subtitles.
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WHAT: AsiaLENS: High Tech Low Life
WHEN: March 11th at 7 p.m.
WHERE: Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum, 600 S. Gregory St., Urbana
ABOUT: High Tech, Low Life follows two of China’s first citizen–reporters as they document the underside of the country’s rapid economic development. A search for truth and fame inspires young vegetable seller “Zola” to report on censored news stories from the cities, while retired businessman “Tiger Temple” makes sense of the past by chronicling the struggles of rural villagers. Land grabs, pollution, rising poverty, local corruption and the growing willingness of ordinary people to speak out are grist for these two bloggers who navigate China’s evolving censorship regulations and challenge the boundaries of free speech.
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WHAT: “Bibliophilia to Bibliomania,” A Lecture by J. Kevin Graffagnino, Director of the Clements Library at the University of Michigan
WHEN: March 12th at 3 p.m.
WHERE: Room 346, Main Library
ABOUT: Sponsored by the Rare Book & Manuscript Library.
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WHAT: Medical Humanities Series Lecture: David Yager – “The Case for an Unusual Collaboration: Artist-Designer, Physicians, and Nurses”
WHEN: March 13th at 4:30 p.m.
WHERE: Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum, 600 S. Gregory Street, Urbana
ABOUT: This talk will focus on collaborations of both medical and non-medical academics, students, and members of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg Children’s Center clinical faculty and staff. Specifically, the talk will be broken up into three different parts: 1) Noise in the NICU – This case study will focus on the unusual level of noise inherent in NICUs around the world. The talk will outline the discovery process, our mistakes and the ultimate solutions that address the complexity of the noise problem. One discovery revealed that noise cancellation was not the ultimate solution for newborns. 2) Hand washing in the hospital – Why do healthcare workers, family members and friends all forget to wash their hands in the hospital? I will explore the phenomenon of human habits, and the effectiveness of measuring the right data that have a real impact in changing human behavior. 3) Pediatric pain management using virtual reality – I had a hard time believing the truth when a Neurologist at the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center told me that I don’t actually feel my back pain. Yet, while observing a very precise, therapeutic environment (i.e., pediatric medicine), I wondered if we could reduce the need for pain medications as part of the standard of pediatric medical care.
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WHAT: Sudden Sound Concert: NGO Nakatani Gong Orchestra
WHEN: March 13th at 7:30 p.m.
WHERE: KAM Gelvin Noel Gallery
ABOUT: Directed by acoustic sound artist and percussionist Tatsuya Nakatani, NGO is a non-traditional music orchestra delving into the rich harmony of multiple gongs. Featuring ten local performers who learn Nakatani’s specialized bowed gong and conduction techniques, NGO concerts immerse listeners in the wide sonic spectrum of resonating gongs. Created in 2011, after ten years of solo performance and collaborations throughout the world, NGO has been presented in over 50 venues. This performance will also feature a solo performance by Tatsuya Nakatani.
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WHAT: Social Meaning and Social Justice: Sally Haslanger, Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (The Philosophy Annual Lecture)
WHEN: March 14th at 4 p.m.
WHERE: Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum, 600 South Gregory, Urbana
ABOUT: Although the Women’s Movement and the Civil Rights Movement achieved great gains in the 20th century, it is also true that our societies remain unjustly stratified.
Individual and institutional injustice are just the tip of the iceberg: they are the expression of deeper and less tractable sources of inequality in social meaning. But what exactly is social meaning? How does social meaning give rise to injustice? And how can we change social meanings?
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WHAT: VOICE Reading Series
WHEN: March 20th at 7:30 p.m.
WHERE: KAM Gelvin Noel Gallery
ABOUT: The VOICE Reading Series showcases readings by fiction writers and poets in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Creative Writing MFA program.
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WHAT: School of Art + Design Placemaking Lecture Series: “Making the Invisible Visible,” Stephanie Rothenberg, Department of Visual Studies, University of Buffalo
WHEN: March 31st at 5:30 p.m.
WHERE: KAM Auditorium
ABOUT: The School of Art + Design Lecture Series is the marquee series of the Visitors Program and is designed to showcase notable national and international artists, designers, and scholars whose work or point of view is engaging and topical. Stephanie Rothenberg, Associate Professor in the Department of Visual Studies at the University of Buffalo will present a lecture entitled “Making the Invisible Visible.”
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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).