Mar 28 Thursday
TU faculty, staff and students join us in welcoming Nina Berman from Arizona State University! She will give a public lecture highlighting the complexities of the lives of Kenyan acrobats and explores their experience in the context of Kenya, but also with an eye toward the situation of uneducated young men globally.
Marginalized young men struggle for survival across the planet. Their marginalization results from poverty and accompanying factors, such as low levels of education and membership in specific ethnic, racial, and religious groups. Their precarious status puts them at risk for being recruited into criminal and violent organizations. Young men in Kenya who decide to become acrobats fit the profile of such marginalized young men. They come from poor families, have little schooling, are members of an indigenous ethnic group, and often have experienced additional hardships.Forming troupes provides a context of solidarity that enables acrobats to transcend their predicaments. Training their bodies and engaging in artistic creation results in an elevated self- image. Performing in extravagant venues, they experience an inspiring recognition that enhances their self-worth. Acrobatics fascinates because it reveals both the strengths and vulnerabilities of the human body. What is known as “kinesthetic empathy” is an outcome of this physical activity that affects both the practitioners and their audiences.
Apr 09 Tuesday
For over 40 years, we have offered all German language class levels, taught by native speakers or certified instructors, with a small student to teacher ratio. Twice each year we provide 12 classes over 12 weeks of teaching in spring and fall. Classes are held inside the GAST Event Center.
Apr 16 Tuesday
Apr 18 Thursday
Sports and music share a deep resistance to language. The essential thing about each that makes it so appealing--bodies moving in space, sounds moving in time--is nonverbal, even anti-verbal. So it's hard to express in words what matters most about sports or music, one reason why both subjects attract so much cliché and inspire other sorts of expressive response, like high fives and dancing.
In this talk, a scholar and veteran writer for the New York Times Magazine and other publications considers how boxing and country music challenge writers to find the words to describe them and consider what they might mean.
Carlo Rotella is the author of books about cities, boxing, blues, and other subjects, the most recent of which is The World Is Always Coming to An End: Pulling Together and Apart in a Chicago Neighborhood.
He contributes regularly to the New York Times Magazine, and his work has also appeared in The New Yorker, the Washington Post Magazine, and The Best American Essays. He has received a Guggenheim fellowship and the Whiting Writers Award, and he is a professor of English, American Studies, and Journalism at Boston College. He's currently at work on a book about teaching freshman English and a book about blues and country music.
Apr 23 Tuesday
Apr 30 Tuesday
May 07 Tuesday
May 14 Tuesday
May 21 Tuesday
May 28 Tuesday