Set in a fictional hill-domain resembling our own Appalachia, Ancient Creekfollows the struggles of native hill folk against colonialist invaders. The hero Jack, familiar from the Jack tale tradition, is the fugitive leader of the people's revolt and the nemesis of the King. Wounded survivors of the revolution find solace and healing on Ancient Creek where old Aunt Haze is the guiding spirit. This edition also includes essays about the story by Jim Wayne Miller, Kevin I. Eyster, Annalucia Accardo, and Dee Davis, founder of the Center for Rural Strategies, who will be joining Gurney at the event.

Location: 

882 E High St

Lexington , Kentucky 40502

Matt Wray, a sociologist from Temple University, has been researching suicide across the United States.

From 2006-2008, Dr. Wray was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholar at Harvard University and this talk is related to his work in medical sociology and public health on suicide. He is also well-known for his scholarship on whiteness and class relations. His books include Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness (Duke University Press, 2006), The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness (coedited, Duke University Press, 2001), Bad Subjects: Political Education for Everyday Life (coedited, New York University Press, 1998), and White Trash: Race and Class in America (coedited, Routledge, 1997). He has published recent articles on suicide in the U.S. in Social Science Quarterly, Social Science & Medicine, and the Annual Review of Sociology.

Matt Wray examines health disparities among different regional populations in the U.S., particularly focusing on the widening gap in health and lifespan between white Appalachian residents and white U.S. residents overall. In his upcoming talk, he will raise the role of stereotyping and stigma as a factor in the population health disparities between regions and will explore the possibility of addressing this in health and social science research without furthering stigmatization and stereotyping of the Appalachian region.

A sign-up sheet is posted outside Julia Johnson's office door (1219 POT).  Please sign up to read a poem by you or by someone else.  Sign-up slots will be in 1/2 hour spots.  So, you will show up to read during your 1/2 hour.  Individual readings should be no longer than 3 minutes.  Invite your friends or just stop by to listen.

For more information contact julia.johnson@uky.edu

The Best of Both Worlds: Blended Learning in the Language Classroom”

Lecture by Dr. Fernando Rubio

Wednesday, March 06

2:30-4:30 pm

P.O.T 18^th floor, West End

Dr. Rubio has a  PhD in Spanish Linguistics from the State University of New York at Buffalo and he is currently teaching Spanish Linguistics at the University of Utah, where he is also Co-Director of the Second Language Teaching and Research Center. His research interests are in the areas of Applied Linguistics and Teaching Methodologies. In 2009 he was awarded the Utah System of Higher Education (USHE) Exemplary Faculty Use of Technology Award and in 2012 he received the ACTFL Award for Excellence in Foreign Language Instruction Using Technology. He has given talks, keynotes, and workshops on language and technology all over the country.  He has taught online and hybrid language courses for years, including the first foreign language MOOC^* ever taught (currently in progress).

He is the author of two textbooks, Tercer Milenio, Kendall-Hunt, 2009, and Juntos, Cengage (forthcoming) and editor of Hybrid Language Teaching and Learning: Exploring Theoretical, Pedagogical and Curricular Issues, Heinle, 2012.

(*) MOOC: Massive Open Online Course

Swati Chattopadhyay is an architect and architectural historian specializing in modern architecture and urbanism, and the cultural landscape of British colonialism. She is interested in the ties between colonialism and modernism, and in the spatial aspects of race, gender, and ethnicity in modern cities that are capable of enriching post-colonial and critical theory. She has served as a director of the Subaltern-Popular Workshop, a University of California Multi-campus Research Group, and is the current editor of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (JSAH). She is the author of Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism, and the Colonial Uncanny (Routledge, 2005; paperback 2006), and Unlearning the City: Infrastructurein a New Optical Field (Minnesota, 2012 forthcoming). Her current work includes a new book project, "Nature's Infrastructure," dealing with  the infrastructural transformation of the Gangetic Plains between the 17th and 19th centuries.

Tom Conley is Lowell Professor in the Departments of Romance Languages and Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. Conley studies relations of space and writing in literature, cartography, and cinema. His work moves to and from early modern France and issues in theory and interpretation in visual media. In 2003, Dr. Conley won a Guggenheim Fellowship for his work in topography and literature in Renaissance France.

Derek Gregory, University of British Columbia: “Gabriel's War: Cartography and the Changing Art of War"

January 25, 2pm

Lexmark Room, Main Building

      Dr. Derek Gregory is a member of the Department of Geography and one of two Peter Wall Distinguished Professors at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.  Dr. Gregory trained as an historical geographer at the University of Cambridge. His research focused on the historical geography of industrialization and on the relations between social theory and human geography and explored a range of critical theories that showed how place, space, and landscape have been involved in the operation and outcome of social processes. His 1982 book, Regional Transformation and Industrial Revolution, was staged on the classic ground of E.P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class. Following a move to Vancouver in 1989, Gregory’s work was reinforced by postcolonial critique, outlined in his 1989 book Geographical Imaginations. This new phase of work owed much to Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism, but it was much more concerned with the corporeality and physicality of travel – with embodied subjects moving through material landscapes – and with the constantly changing (often mislaid) cultural baggage of the travelers. And it paid attention what travelers mapped, sketched, and photographed – and to the consequences these representations had for their encounters.

This work on travel and travel writing was interrupted by the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001, and the focus of his research shifted to the present. Drawing on his training as an historical geographer and his sense of the renewed power of Orientalism, Dr. Gregory traced the long history of British and American involvements in the “Middle East,” and showed how these affected the cultural, political, and military responses to 9/11. The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq (2004) showed how war quite literally takes place, and described in detail the violent ‘taking of places’ not only in Afghanistan and Iraq but in occupied Palestine. The study showed how the conduct of war connects the abstractions of geopolitics – the pronouncements of politicians, the strategies of generals – to the lives and deaths of countless ordinary men and women.

His forthcoming book, The Everywhere War, shows how the conduct of war is shaped by the spaces through which it is conducted; ranging from the global war prison at Guantanamo Bay through counterinsurgency in Baghdad and the drone wars in Afghanistan/Pakistan. His new research project, Killing space, is a critical study of the techno-cultural and political dimensions of air war. It focuses on three major campaigns: the combined bombing offensive against Germany in the Second World War, America’s air wars over Indochina, and the present use of UAVs in Afghanistan/Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and elsewhere.  It pays particular attention to the changing ways in which cities (and eventually people) have been visualized as targets within what is now called the ‘kill-chain,’ and to the different ways in which the media have represented and reported bombing to different publics.

The UK Appalachian Center, Appalachian Studies, and the Graduate Appalachian Research Community (GARC) seek to promote interdisciplinary dialogue on issues in Appalachia.  We are proud to follow up our first three successful symposia with the 2013 UK Appalachian Research Symposium and Arts Showcase.  We extend invitations to both undergraduate and graduate students of all disciplines who are currently attending an accredited Kentucky university or college.  The symposium is intended to foster a supportive community in which students from various fields can present their Appalachian-based research and creative work, learn from each others' findings, and discuss research and practice obstacles, successes and potential points of collaboration.  Students creating performance or visual artworks related to Appalachia are strongly encouraged to participate. 

For more information go to https://appalachiancenter.as.uky.edu/sites/default/files/GARC%20Symposium%20CFP%202013.pdf

The University of Kentucky Political Ecology Working Group is hosting the third annual Dimensions of Political Ecology: Conference on Nature Society.

Now in its third year, the 2013 Dimensions of Political Ecology Conference will provide opportunities to engage with contemporary scholarship on the political-economic causes and effects of environmental degradation and ecological change. With an interdisciplinary and international group of presenters, panelists, and keynote speakers, this year's conference will offer considerable insight into pressing contemporary questions relating to sustainability, global climate change, and local environmental conflicts. This year, we have over 200 scheduled presenters, representing a wide variety of geographic and disciplinary affiliations.

The final program can be view here.

 

Listen to a podcast about the Political Ecology Group below.

The dates for the event are 2/28 (5:30 PM) until 3/2 (10:00 PM).

The final program link is here.

The conference website can be found here.

And we also have a podcast.