Kevin A. Wisniewski, first year Ph.D. candidate in the Language, Literacy, and Culture program, was named a 2012-2013 HASTAC Scholar.  Dr. Craig Saper, Director of the LLC program, was selected to serve as Wisniewski’s HASTAC Mentor. 

HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory, pronounced “haystack”) is a virtual organization of over 7000 individuals and institutions inspired by the possibilities that new technologies offer for shaping how society learns, teaches, communicates, creates, and organizes at the local and global levels. It was founded by Cathy N. Davidson, former Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies and co-founder of the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University, and David Theo Goldberg, Director of the University of California’s state-wide Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI),

The HASTAC Scholars program is an annual fellowship program that recognizes graduate students who are engaged in innovative work across disciplines.  Among their duties, HASTAC Scholars blog, host forums, organize events and discuss new ideas, projects, experiments, and technologies that re-conceive teaching, learning, research, writing and structuring knowledge. They also function as links between their home institutions and the virtual community they foster on the HASTAC site.

Wisniewski’s research investigates the future of the book and changing face of publishing in the digital world.  He will be founding a new group and forum at HASTAC dedicated to digital publishing; his blog can be found here.

Ellen Handler Spitz recently reviewed the Museum of Modern Art exhibit “The Century of the Child:: Growing by Design 1900-2000” for the online magazine artcritical.

Spitz says that the exhibit “bypasses emotion.”  “Much of the intense passion, however—the felt crises, anxieties, puzzlements, riotous humor, and delirious joys— that characterize living children both mentally and behaviorally has gone missing,” she writes.

Spitz says that through the exhibit, you come to see how children are used to advance adult ideas, and that today’s “child is as much a projection of adult fantasy and social ideology as the pale coy innocents of the pre-Raphaelites or the bedizened seventeenth century infantas of Velázquez.”

She concludes that there is “no such thing as the child but rather millions of uniquely responsive children, and adults, for whom childhood, despite varying degrees of distance, can still be occasionally invoked.”

Spitz’s piece, “MoMA and Child: The Century of the Child at the Museum of Modern Art,” appeared on the website on September 24.

Kimberly Moffitt, assistant professor of American Studies, responded to the new film “Won’t Back Down” in a September 28 Baltimore Sun op-ed entitled “Education blame game leaves kids behind.”

The film, inspired by true events, tells the story of America’s public school system through the story of two women from disparate socioeconomic backgrounds who find common ground when both are faced with the task of finding better public school alternatives for their  children with learning differences.

Moffitt relates the tone of the movie, with it’s heroes and villans, to the discussion around Baltimore’s public schools. “Where we go wrong is in focusing on fault and blame when it comes to the failing schools (charters and traditional) in our district. If we allow ourselves to  remain in the contentious ‘us versus them’ state depicted in ‘Won’t Back Down,’  it will be a missed opportunity for our fair city. We must avoid unproductive debates and instead focus on the models that foster success.”

Moffitt ends her piece with a call to “rally the troops, not to take over schools but to contribute our time, resources  and ideas to offer the world-class education all of our children deserve.”

Lee Boot, associate director of the Imaging Research Center, is featured in Convergence, a new book from theNational Academy of Sciences that highlights the academy’s exceptional and growing art collection.

Boots contribution includes a commission he created for the collection last year is included in the book and an essay by him pointing to new directions in the collaboration between artists and scientists. Boot’s essay is one of only fourteen in the book.  The book alsi includes essays from art and science thought-leaders as E. O. Wilson, Roald Hoffmann, Anne Collins Goodyear, Andrew Solomon, and Lucy Lippard, and artwork from well-known artists such as Tim Rollins and the Start Twins.

The entire book is available online free of charge; Boot’s contribution can be seen here.

Washington City Paper has been covering a story about D.C.’s Certified Business Enterprise (CBE) contracting system and today responded to Mayor Gray’s statement that he’ll soon announce “a number of reform efforts” to the CBE. Gray has not provided details about those reforms, though they might involve additional staffing at the Department of Small and Local Business Development, which currently has no employees dedicated to investigating fraud in the CBE program, despite perceptions of fraud.

Where should they look for expertise on how to fix the program? UMBC political science professor George R. LaNoue told the paper, “I don’t know of anybody who has looked at the D.C. program.” Expressing concern over the dearth of data he continued, “These are very complicated issues, and for the most part people haven’t studied them.”

In the October, 2012 issue of the Chesapeake Bay Journal Karl Blankenship writes:

“Farmers in the Potomac headwaters will get help restoring stream buffers that improve coldwater fish habitat. Landowners in Pennsylvania’s Franklin County will be encouraged to convert turf to forest. And on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, workers will remove a dam and restore floodplains to open 13 miles of high-quality habitat for imperiled river herring and American eel populations.”

Blankenship goes on:

“Some projects go beyond restoration and seek ways to accelerate the implementation of runoff controls. For instance, a $324,000 project by the Center for Urban Environmental Research and Education [CUERE] at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, will install pervious pavement at the Maryland Science Center as a demonstration project as well as explore institutional barriers to such innovative stormwater practices and how they can be overcome.”

The principle investigator on the CUERE grant is Stuart Schwartz. 

Alumnus Gregory Cantori ’84, geography (cartography), was named the new president for Maryland Nonprofits beginning October 1st, according to an article in Maryland Reporter published September 25th.

Cantori will head an organization that includes roughly1,400 nonprofit organizations and 300 associate members in the state, of which many are used by statewide and local government agencies to provide social, health, housing and educational services. The new president has significant experience with such efforts, having worked in various capacities at the Downtown Sailing Center, the Marion I. & Henry J. Knott Foundation, and the Light Street Housing Corporation among others over the years.

Speaking with reporter Len Lazarick, Cantori said that he’s, “always looking at innovative ways to raise money,” adding that “I feel like like I’m going to be a funder without the funding.” Nevertheless, he also feels that this is a particularly good time for nonprofits and their futures in Maryland right now.

UMBC political science professor Roy T. Meyers commented in today’s Baltimore Sun story, “Leopold attorney bills taxpayers almost $21K for two weeks.” Anne Arundel County has so far been billed $20,743 by a private lawyer to defend County Executive John Leopold in a discrimination lawsuit, raising questions about who should pay the growing tab.

Responding to the case, Meyers asked, “What level of defense is a county executive entitled to?” questioning whether the county would act similarly on behalf of other employees. He noted, “The question to ask is whether a mid-level supervisor, say in the public works department, accused of the same pattern of behavior would have received the same level of defense.”

Meyers also appeared on ABC7 this week, criticizing ads that promote and decry Maryland’s upcoming gambling referendum by misusing data on the impact of casinos. Meyers said, “They are used to show a larger effect to the public—either positive or negative—than what an objective economist or jobs expert would calculate.”

�A Lot of Heart in This Space�

UMBC celebrated the grand opening of the university’s Performing Arts and Humanities Building on September 19, 2012, with “New Space”—a thought-provoking discussion among 14 of Baltimore’s most innovative cultural luminaries.

Co-presented by the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance (GBCA), the event showcased the new building as a catalyst in forging vital partnerships between the university and Greater Baltimore community. Tom Hall, WYPR radio host and Baltimore Choral Arts Society director, moderated the discussion of how new spaces inspire us to think, create and engage in unexpected ways.

Professors Wendy Salkind, theatre, and Jessica Berman, English, shared their appreciation for how the new building emphasizes—in a profound, public way—the priority UMBC and Maryland place on liberal arts education.

Doreen Bolger, executive director of the Baltimore Museum of Art, and George Ciscle, founder of The Contemporary Museum, reflected on physical, digital and transitory spaces, and how each can create new opportunities for conversations about art and society. Bolger found our mantra—“Think. Create. Engage.”—to be particularly salient, provoking important questions about the public relevance of museums.
           
Fred Lazarus, president of the Maryland Institute College of Art, has responded to that same concern through founding and growing Baltimore’s annual Artscape festival and promoting the arts-based revitalization of Station North, a neighborhood where speaker Timothy Nohe, UMBC associate professor of visual arts, has also been highly engaged. Lazarus commented, “Space is the envelope that allows exciting creativity to happen,” whether organically, as in the case of Station North, or intentionally, as with the new Performing Arts and Humanities Building.

David Mitchell, assistant artistic director of Arena Players, and Vincent Lancisi, founder of Everyman Theatre, focused on the importance of diversity in the arts. Collaboration among artists with different perspectives, they argued, can be transformational.

“I really feel that the arts enable us to see the human experience better,” said Sharayna Christmas Rose, executive director of MUSE 360. She spoke of bringing young Baltimore actors to African diaspora communities across the U.S. and Caribbean to perform in public spaces and engage with new audiences. Bashi Rose, co-founder of Nommo Theatre, also helps artists reach beyond spatial limitations. Rose works within prisons where, he says, performers must find something inside themselves that can transform their environment into a “space of freedom.”
           
Kalima Young, coordinator of The Baltimore Art + Justice Project, and Nicole King, assistant professor of American Studies at UMBC, share a passion for mapping as a tool to interpret space. Young uses demographic maps to connect local artists to issues they can address and social advocates to artists interested in their causes, in order to promote “stronger, more relevant work that impacts structural issues in this community.” King’s mapmaking centers on storytelling: recording and sharing the cultural history of Baltimore’s Baybrook community.

Inhabiting a space, King reminded the audience, fills it with meaning and turns it into a place. And places have power. “The places we inhabit shape the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves,” said Kevin Griffin Moreno ’96, history, founder and host of Potluck Storytelling.

Final speaker Marvin Pinkert, executive director of The Jewish Museum of Maryland, explored how new stories reshape our thinking about old places, and old stories enable us to think about new spaces. Beyond peeling paint on the walls, what distinguishes an old space from a new one for him is experience—what the building has witnessed and who has inhabited it over time. As far as UMBC’s newest theatre goes, Pinkert shared, “There’s going to be a lot of heart in this space.”

Visit SoundCloud to hear all of the audio clips from “New Space” and the theatre’s inaugural musical performance by Governor Martin O’Malley. 

(9/20/12)

A new report from The Education Trust finds that UMBC is among the top colleges in the country for promoting Hispanic student success.

The brief, “Advancing to Completion: Increasing degree attainment by improving graduation rates and closing gaps for Hispanic students,” examined the achievement gap between Hispanic and white students at public and private colleges nationwide, and whether those institutions were successfully working to narrow that gap.

The study found that UMBC ranked 12th among public colleges for improvements in Hispanic students’ graduation rates between 2004 and 2010. Hispanic students at UMBC saw a 21.8-percentage-point increase in their six-year graduation rates, compared to a 3.5 point increase nationally. And UMBC ranked 13th nationally for its progress in narrowing the achievement gap between white and Hispanic students, with the two groups graduating at essentially the same rate.

The full report is available online from The Education Trust.