CURRENTS: Foad Hamidi (Info Systems) & J. Inscoe (LLC)
Virtual
Monday, March 30, 2020 · 12 - 1 PM
Online
CURRENTS: Humanities Work Now lunchtime series showcases exciting
new faculty work in the humanities in a dynamic and inter-disciplinary
setting with short, informal presentations and time for discussion.
The session will take place via Webex. Join us by clicking this link.
Password: 5hmTSxq7na3
Designing Participatory Futures: Using DIY Technologies for Inclusion and Empowerment
Foad Hamidi
Assistant Professor, Information Systems, UMBC
Assistant Professor, Information Systems, UMBC
Do-it-yourself (DIY) and maker approaches to technology design and fabrication offer exciting opportunities for users to create and customize their own technologies. Foad Hamidi’s research has shown that DIY processes offer opportunities for empowerment, learning, and interdisciplinary collaboration. In this talk, he will demonstrate the possibilities and challenges of DIY approaches to technology design, working with people with disabilities, youth and children in informal learning contexts, and artists who work with living organisms.
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Sonic Waves of Grain: Paul Harvey's American Evangelism
J. Inscoe
PhD Candidate, Language, Literacy, and Culture, UMBC; Spring 2020 Dresher Center Graduate Student Fellow
PhD Candidate, Language, Literacy, and Culture, UMBC; Spring 2020 Dresher Center Graduate Student Fellow
This talk explores the work of radio broadcaster Paul Harvey to examine the cultivation of a proper American voice—properly straight, moral, domestic, national, and authoritative—through an ideologically convenient crisis of White masculinity. Harvey emblemized the answer to the cultural anxieties of the 20th-century United States, and by the 21st century, Harvey's discourse became a standard for conservative originality and authority. Ultimately, J. Inscoe contends that understanding Harvey as an acoustic icon of acceptable masculinity in the past sheds light on a continued crisis of masculinity and its relationship with conservative voice and rhetoric in the present.
