2013-2014

What Happiness Is

H. Friedl is an acclaimed film director whose documentaries are regularly shown on Austrian public tv. He was granted permission to accompany a team of government agents as they travelled to the remotest hamlets in the Himalayas. What makes our lives worth living? The official results of this survey reporting on Bhutan’s GNH (gross national happiness) can be found online. The unofficial results in Friedl’s extraordinary documentary form a mosaic of intimate portraits and glimpses into the soul of a people. To one Bhutanese happiness is to be born as a human and not as an ant or a pig.

“An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!”: Black Women Communists of the Old Left and Critical Perspectives on Global Capitalism

ways black women in the US Communist Party (CPUSA) of the Old Left period (1919-1956) forged a ground-breaking radical black feminist praxis that challenged orthodox Marxist framings of capitalism through centering race and gender to their political thought and activism. Given that women of color remain at the bottom of contemporary global social hierarchies, the experiences of Old Left black women radicals provide important lessons for diagnosing current social injustices and for reimagining and building new societies locally and globally.

Speech, Gesture, Bodily Stance, Graphics, Music, and Media: Studying Multimodal Communication in a Massive Dataset

A Baker-Nord Faculty Work-in-Progress

Human communication is multimodal, involving language, co-speech gesture, interpersonal interaction, audiovisual components, media, and technology. Our views of traditional texts have only just begun to include examples of multimodal communication. Professor Turner’s talk will look at theoretical and empirical aspects of computer-assisted research on a massive multimodal corpus of human language and communication.

Creating a Digital Database on High-altitude Human Biology

A Freedman Fellows Presentation

Kelvin Smith Library will host a presentation by 2013 Freedman Fellow, Dr. Cynthia Beall (Distinguished University Professor, Anthropology). Dr. Beall will discuss the challenges and solutions related to her research, and how they were addressed by the Freedman Fellows Program and its corresponding support.

About the Speakers

Cynthia Beall

Rose Wohlgemuth Weisman Women’s Voices Lecture: A Conversation with Jane Smiley

his event features a conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and essayist Jane Smiley. Her novels include “A Thousand Acres”, “Moo”,”The All True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton”, “Horse Heaven” and “Private Life”. She has contributed to a wide range of magazines and newspapers, including The New Yorker, Elle, Outside, The New York Times, Harper’s, The American Prospect, Practical Horseman, The Guardian, The Nation, Real Simple, and Playboy.

Public Libraries in the Digital Age

Sari Feldman — for the past ten years the Executive Director of Cuyahoga County Public Library (CCPL) — will discuss both how digital technologies are impacting American public libraries and how budget & demographic shifts are creating challenges for these libraries that are busier and more relevant than ever. The CCPL network has 28 branches and serves 47 communities. Feldman is also President of the Board of Cuyahoga Arts and Culture, a political subdivision of the State of Ohio, and one of the largest local public funders of arts and culture in the nation.

Return to the River: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Rivers in World Literature

A Baker-Nord Cosponsored Event

This meeting of the Interdisciplinary World Literature Colloquium will reprise and expand the topic of Charles Burroughs’s January 2014 lecture on rivers in world literature. Discussion will focus on poems and prose in Greek, Latin, French, English, and Italian as well as on selected artworks. Presenters will include Florin Berindeanu, Charles Burroughs, Sarah Gridley, Takao Hagiwara, and Timothy Wutrich.

For any questions, please contact Professor Timothy Wutrich at (trw14@cwru.edu) or or 216-368-6026.

“Interpreting Capitalism” Film Series: INSIDE JOB

2010 Oscar Winner for Best Documentary, “Inside Job” provides a comprehensive analysis of the global financial crisis of 2008, which at a cost over $20 trillion, caused millions of people to lose their jobs and homes in the worst recession since the Great Depression, and nearly resulted in a global financial collapse. Through exhaustive research and extensive interviews with key financial insiders, politicians, journalists, and academics, the film traces the rise of a rogue industry that has corrupted politics, regulation, and academia.

Poetry in the Museum: The Nature of Nature

A Baker-Nord Cosponsored Event

In a thought-provoking afternoon at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, a panel of nationally recognized poets will address the “Nature of Nature”. Before the discussion/ reading, the guest poets will announce the winners of the 2014 Poetry in the Museum contest, who will read their winning poems. Support provided by the Helen Buchman Sharnoff Endowed Fund for Poetry at Case Western Reserve University, as well as by the CWRU Office of Diversity.

What’s on TV?

What are we watching when we watch television? What are the conditions of possibility — economic, technical, and aesthetic — that have changed the medium in the 21st century? Provocative questions, answers for which are constantly re-shaped by the interrelated dynamics of audience, advertising revenue, and technology. Nicholas Brown — professor of English at the University of Illinois, Chicago — discusses how contemporary distribution technologies and viewing habits have radically altered the impact that television has upon our culture and economy.