Feb 18, 2019 | Essay, From the Chair
Our elevator in the Humanities Building stopped working last week, and while it may seem a minor inconvenience on the surface, I immediately felt a sense of shame for how it impacted our students with disabilities and any other community members who are affected. I...
Feb 11, 2019 | Essay, From the Chair
Twenty-first century institutions of art are spaces in which compassion, empathy, and institutional responsibility must be carefully balanced. Those who choose a career in the arts must be particularly responsive to the changes in cultural expectations while still...
Feb 4, 2019 | Essay, From the Chair
In a short book, The Gift, written in 1966 by the French sociologist Marcel Mauss, the author distinguishes the numerous differences between historically understood gift economies; in which interactions are almost always reciprocal and more often than not used to...
Jan 28, 2019 | Essay, From the Chair
As the 21st century progresses, the narrative that we are telling in our teaching and mentoring gets more crowded. Movements come and go more quickly, the politics of the era become increasingly more complex, information flows more quickly (there is simply more of...
Jan 10, 2019 | Essay, From the Chair, News
It is my intent today to be unashamedly utopian, to address how we look at, how we discuss, how we circulate and inscribe images of dancing bodies in a pluralistic world, a world that is increasingly mediated by technologies of representation, by social media, and by...
Dec 3, 2018 | Essay, From the Chair
It is my duty to voice the sufferings of people, the sufferings that never end and are as big as mountains. Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945) Can art really convey empathy? What can an image really do in the world to empower or encourage empathy? I pose those questions...