Beloved Community Faculty Scholarship Symposium (Overview of Offerings)

St. Norbert College faculty will offer brief presentations on their scholarship and creative work related to diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging. This hourlong session includes two presentations as well as time for Q&A; feel free to come and go as you’re able.

Note for faculty and instructors: If you plan to attend this session with a class, please register for yourself and all your students so organizers can have an accurate headcount. 

Brian Pirman (Art) presents “Black Lives Matter Identity”
When the George Floyd/Black Lives Matter took off I gave my students an assignment related to the movement. I had each one of my students design a logo for the Black Lives Matter movement. They were encouraged to use yellow and black which is part of the existing identity. The students then applied the logo in very unique and interesting ways. I would like to present these logos and applications to coincide with "Beloved Community Week"

Taylor Giorgio (Music) presents “Fostering Inclusion in the Music Appreciation Class”
How has music served as a vessel for communication and reflection of social issues throughout time? What changes are happening (or need to happen) in the classical music world to promote diversity and representation in both performers and audiences? In this presentation, I will explore how I’ve used the Music Appreciation curriculum to guide students to an inclusive perspective when discussing and thinking about music. The class looks at musical genres such as Spirituals, blues, jazz, classical music, film music, and musical theater, thinking about how social issues, including race, are intertwined in the subject matter, the performers, and the music itself. Students consider how composers and their works were shaped by the society they lived in, and how current performing ensembles are responding to today’s world. The class culminates in a collaborative project with the Civic Symphony of Green Bay, where students present proposals suggesting new ways to diversify and expand the audience at their concerts.

St. Norbert College faculty will offer brief presentations on their scholarship and creative work related to diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging. This hourlong session includes two presentations as well as time for Q&A; feel free to come and go as you’re able.

Note for faculty and instructors: If you plan to attend this session with a class, please register for yourself and all your students so organizers can have an accurate headcount. 

Lucy Arendt (Business Administration) presents “Taking a Whole Community Approach to Resilience: Why All Voices Must Be Heard”
Natural hazards become disasters when they intersect with human beings and negatively affect their lives and livelihoods. Often, those most affected by disasters are historically disadvantaged folks, in large part because they tend to live in substandard housing, have limited transportation and other means, and do not have the monetary and other resources needed to sustain them during the community's recovery. Effective planning for community resilience means doing what needs doing before a disaster strikes to ensure the community’s sustainability in the aftermath. In this presentation, I'll discuss research on what communities can do to engage all voices in planning for community resilience so we can fulfill our moral obligation to respect everyone’s dignity and agency.

Krissy Lukens (Information Technology Services) presents “MLK Mapathon”
Each year, disasters around the world kill nearly 100,000 and affect or displace 200 million people. Many of the places where these disasters occur are literally 'missing' from open and accessible maps and first responders lack the information to make valuable decisions regarding relief efforts. Missing Maps is an open, collaborative project in which you can help to map areas where humanitarian organizations are trying to meet the needs of people who live at risk of disasters and crises. This is an opportunity to bring your laptop, roll up your sleeves and participate in the hands-on MLK Mapathon to help make a difference!

St. Norbert College faculty will offer brief presentations on their scholarship and creative work related to diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging. This hourlong session includes two presentations as well as time for Q&A; feel free to come and go as you’re able.

Note for faculty and instructors: If you plan to attend this session with a class, please register for yourself and all your students so organizers can have an accurate headcount. 
David Poister (Chemistry) presents “King’s Revolutionary/Evolutionary Dream”
This talk will examine King’s religiously based campaign for racial justice through the lens of human evolution. Using a science-informed theology approach, King’s call for unification will be interpreted as a continuation of the evolutionary processes of aggregation and cooperation that have generated complexity in biological systems and have driven human progress. The importance of viewing King’s message in an evolutionary light will be discussed.

Anh Sy Huy Le (History) presents “Dr. Martin Luther King’s Cosmopolitanism: Afro-Asian Solidarity, Decoloniality, and Third-World Consciousness”
It is often overlooked how the American Civil Rights and Black Liberation Movements in the United States took place in the intertwined context of a shifting world order rooted in the gradual collapses of European empires in Asia and Africa, the beginning of the Cold War, and violent decolonization across the Global South. This lecture explores the cosmopolitan legacies of Dr. King’s as part of a global intellectual history of anti-colonial praxes and progressive revolts against racial and capitalist oppressions. It will highlight how the emergence of a shared global consciousness of racial injustice during World War II and the postcolonial fights for equality—what historian Nico Slate terms “colored cosmopolitanism”—shaped Dr. King’s political activism and how they, in turn, generated new radical forms of cross-ethnic solidarity and movements in the United States from the 1960s to the present.

St. Norbert College faculty will offer brief presentations on their scholarship and creative work related to diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging. This hourlong session includes two presentations as well as time for Q&A; feel free to come and go as you’re able.

Note for faculty and instructors: If you plan to attend this session with a class, please register for yourself and all your students so organizers can have an accurate headcount. 

Danielle Geerling (Psychology) presents “Defining Diversity: The Role of Egalitarian Values”
Many organizations seek to diversify, yet "diversity" is an ambiguous term that can be defined and interpreted differently depending on an individual's characteristics, context, and motivations. In particular, a person may choose to define diversity in terms of numerical representation (simply put, the number of different types of people represented in an organization) or in terms of social acceptance and inclusion, by taking into account the degree to which different types of people feel they belong in an organization. In this work, we find suggestive evidence that participants who take a moment to reflect on what egalitarianism means to them are more likely to define diversity in terms of inclusion and social acceptance, rather than mere numerical representation.

Pooja Bambha-Arora (Education) presents “Beyond Cultural Competence”
This presentation examines how cultural competence can be built in students through an understanding of historical and social positioning of cultures in the U.S.

St. Norbert College faculty will offer brief presentations on their scholarship and creative work related to diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging. This hourlong session includes two presentations as well as time for Q&A; feel free to come and go as you’re able.

Note for faculty and instructors: If you plan to attend this session with a class, please register for yourself and all your students so organizers can have an accurate headcount. 

Deirdre Egan-Ryan (English) presents “‘Make a Poet Black and Bid Him Sing’: Modern Black Literature and the Vocational Call to Community”
Patrick Reyes’ recent book, The Purpose Gap, examines the ways that discussions about purpose and meaning have excluded communities of color whose stories of vocation resist the hero narrative so lauded by proponents of rugged individualism. Reyes suggests that this individualistic mode of storytelling has invisibly and dangerously been coded in terms of white power and privilege. In literary studies, modern black writers address this issue in rich and complex ways, as they frame stories of development that resist typical literary structures and instead propose a counter narrative of black communal vocation. This presentation demonstrates how much is at stake when considering vocation more expansively in black literature. Reading these influential writers together allows us to imagine how we might begin to close the purpose gap so all may flourish.

Eric Hagedorn (Philosophy) presents “Diversifying the Philosophical Canon by Going Medieval”
As has been widely noted, the standard canon of philosophical texts is overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly male, and overwhelmingly European, a fact not unrelated to the racism and sexism of the 18th- and 19th-century writers who are responsible for creating the modern canon. Recent calls to diversify the philosophical canon by including more non-Western and non-male authors would benefit from paying closer attention to the largely forgotten and ignored medieval philosophical tradition, in which many of the most important voices were from Africa or central Asia, and in which women played a more important role than has often been recognized. Here I very briefly review a few of those important figures and their key contributions.

St. Norbert College faculty will offer brief presentations on their scholarship and creative work related to diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging. This hourlong session includes two presentations as well as time for Q&A; feel free to come and go as you’re able.

Note for faculty and instructors: If you plan to attend this session with a class, please register for yourself and all your students so organizers can have an accurate headcount. 

Katie Ginsbach (Modern Languages & Literatures) presents “Recovering Voices from the Margins in Spanish Film, Television and Literature”
How do we remember times we never lived? How can films, documentaries, television, and literature be used to seek justice and denounce the wrongs of previous times? In this presentation, I will give a brief overview of historical representations that attempt to deal with the weight of Spain's national past, particularly in regard to abuses of power, cultural or religious discrimination, and social injustice. I will also discuss how these sources reflect present concerns in Spanish society as well as the ongoing effort in contemporary Spain to recover the voices and experiences of those who have been silenced, repressed, or written out of history.

Lauren Eriks Cline (English) presents “Reviewing Ira Aldridge”
This presentation will provide a brief overview of the career of Ira Aldridge, the first Black American to play Shakespeare on the international stage in the early-to-mid nineteenth century, and it will also explore some of the historiographical questions raised by studying the reviews produced by his (mostly white) European audiences. In addition to introducing students to Aldridge's remarkable career, which included everything from a critically acclaimed whiteface Shylock to what would traditionally have been blackface roles in minstrel plays, I will focus on exploring questions about how racial meanings get made and recirculated. I will close with some ideas about the possibilities for anti-racist reflection on our own position as historical spectators.

St. Norbert College faculty will offer brief presentations on their scholarship and creative work related to diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging. This hourlong session includes two presentations as well as time for Q&A; feel free to come and go as you’re able.

Note for faculty and instructors: If you plan to attend this session with a class, please register for yourself and all your students so organizers can have an accurate headcount. 

AnaMaria Clawson (English) presents “Haiti and Religious Nativism in Early American Literature”
How have we narrated the history of religious intolerance in the U.S.? This presentation examines the longer literary history of religious nativism and specifically the role that early U.S. perceptions of the Caribbean played in its development. Analyzing one early American novel set during the Haitian Revolution alongside anti-Catholic propaganda, it demonstrates how early Americans relied upon depictions of Black revolution to validate ongoing Protestant concerns about Catholicism’s perceived threat to moral and racial purity. Such depictions call our attention to the religious rhetoric through which depictions of Black resistance have been put for the purposes of reaffirming whiteness.

Ben Menghini (Theology & Religious Studies) presents “Generous Orthodoxy and the Tragic Disposition”
This presentation will consider the possibility of a generous orthodoxy, a concept left underdeveloped by the untimely death of theologian Hans Frei. Exploring how something as rigid and apologetic as orthodoxy can possibly become generous I will propose that the practitioners of an orthodoxy must approach the world with a tragic disposition, a vulnerable and receptive form of life. Generous orthodoxy then makes possible an alternative to the racial and colonial hegemonies that Dr. King lived his life resisting. This presentation draws on the work of theologian Willie Jennings, cultural theorist Stuart Hall, and anthropologist David Scott.