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Past Events

Tuesday, 29 Mar 2011

The Power of Our Convictions - Documentary and Discussion with Freedom Rider Rip Patton and Facing History Staff
12:10 PM – Pioneer Room, Memorial Union - A faculty forum with Freedom Rider Rip Patton will follow the 60-minute preview of Freedom Riders, a documentary premiering on PBS in May 2011. The film chronicles the harrowing and ultimately inspirational story of six months in 1961 that changed America forever. From May until November 1961, more than 400 black and white Americans risked their lives - and many endured savage beatings and imprisonment - for simply traveling together on buses and trains as they journeyed through the Deep South. Deliberately violating Jim Crow laws, the Freedom Riders met with bitter racism and mob violence along the way, sorely testing their belief in nonviolent activism. In partnership with Facing History, Iowa State faculty will discuss the film and its implications for the lives of educators today. Concepts such as "universe of obligation" and flexible teaching strategies such as Big Paper and Town Hall Meeting will also be explored. Students and staff are welcome to attend this faculty forum. Registration is required to attend this event. Lunch will be provided. To register, go to AccessPlus > Employee tab> HRS Training > Courses. Questions? Call CELT at 294-5357.

Thursday, 24 Mar 2011

The Case for Working with Your Hands - Matthew Crawford
8:00 PM – Great Hall, Memorial Union - Matthew Crawford is a philosopher and mechanic. His bestselling book Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work is about the once familiar and now uncommon experience of making and fixing things with your hands. He makes a case for reclaiming some measure of self-reliance and encourages people to reconnect with their material world and value the manual trades. Crawford majored in physics as an undergraduate and then turned to political philosophy, earning a PhD from the University of Chicago. He is currently a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia and also runs a motorcycle repair business in Richmond, Virginia. Part of the National Affairs Series on Innovation.

proACTIVE ART - Bunky Echo-Hawk
8:00 PM – 207 Marston Hall - Bunky Echo-Hawk (Pawnee/Yakama) is a multi-talented artist who has merged traditional values with his lifestyle and art. A graduate of the Institute of American Indian Arts, he is a fine artist, graphic designer, photographer, writer and poet. He is also a traditional singer and dancer. In 2006 he cofounded NVision, a collective of Native American artists, musicians, community organizers, and nonprofit professionals who focus on Native American youth empowerment through multimedia arts. He served as its executive director until 2009. He has raised thousands of dollars for national nonprofit organizations creating works of art live for auction. The 2011 Richard Thompson Memorial Lecture.

Papers: Stories of Undocumented Youth - Film and Discussion with Susana Munoz and Yahaira Carrillo
7:00 PM – Sun Room, Memorial Union - Papers is the story of undocumented youth in the United States and the challenges they face as they turn eighteen without legal status. Every year, 65,000 undocumented students graduate from high school without "papers" and without a path to citizenship. It is against the law for them to work or drive and difficult, if not impossible in some states, to attend college. Papers follows five undocumented students and the grass-roots movement in support of the DREAM Act, legislation aimed at providing certain undocumented students an opportunity for permanent resident status. A discussion led by Susana Munoz and Yahaira Carrillo will immediately follow the 88-min film. Susana Munoz is a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies specializing in issues of immigration in higher education. Yahaira Carrillo, an immigrant and student at Rockhurst University, is the founder of the Kansas and Missouri DREAM Alliance, which works to help undocumented youth in their transition from high school to college by connecting them to resources in the community.

The Christchurch Earthquake: Lessons Learned for the Midwest and United States - Sri Sritharan
5:30 PM – Alliant Energy Lee Liu Auditorium, Howe Hall - Sri Sritharan, Wilson Engineering Professor in civil engineering, was asked to serve on a reconnaissance team to study the damage in Christchurch, New Zealand. He was also asked to come back to the United States and the Midwest with "lessons learned" from this 6.3 earthquake, of even greater significance after the devastation in Japan.

Wednesday, 23 Mar 2011

Art is Long, Life is Short: The Writer’s Struggle to Create Something that Lasts - Deb Marquart
7:30 PM – Sun Room, Memorial Union - Debra Marquart was a touring road musician with rock and heavy metal bands in the seventies and eighties before her career took an academic turn. She is now a professor of English in the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Environment at Iowa State. Her collection of short stories, The Hunger Bone, draws from her experiences on the road. She continues to perform with a jazz-poetry rhythm-and-blues project, The Bone People, with whom she has released two CDs. Marquart is the author of two poetry collections: Everything's a Verb and From Sweetness. Her memoir, The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere, received the Elle Lettres Award from Elle Magazine and the 2007 PEN USA Creative Nonfiction Award. She is currently working on a novel set in Greece titled A Formal Feeling Comes. College of Liberal Arts & Sciences Dean's Lecture Series.

Tuesday, 22 Mar 2011

A Lifetime of Chemistry: Reflections of a Nobel Laureate - Richard Schrock
8:00 PM – Sun Room, Memorial Union - Richard Schrock received the 2005 Nobel Laureate Prize in Chemistry for his work on metathesis, a process now widely used in the development of pharmaceuticals and in the manufacture of advanced plastic materials. Specifically, Schrock discovered a metal-compound catalyst that triggers metathesis, a chemical reaction that breaks and reconstructs the bonds between carbon atoms and the clusters the atoms form. His work was an important advancement in "green chemistry" as a method that reduces potentially hazardous waste through smarter production. Schrock earned a PhD from Harvard University, did postdoctoral work at Cambridge, and joined the faculty at MIT in 1975. He is has held the position of Frederick G. Keyes Professor of Chemistry at MIT since 1989. The 2011 Iowa State Presidential Lectureship in Chemistry.

Debunking Myths on Immigration - Geofrey Fisher
3:00 PM – 3558 Memorial Union - Learn common myths about undocumented youth and current immigration policy. Geofrey Fisher is a project coordinator with the Iowa Immigration Education Coalition. IEC is a multi-perspective group of business, labor, civil rights, religious, immigrant, education, social service, government, and other community leaders united for the purpose of providing Iowans with relevant and timely information about immigration issues and their impact on Iowans and their communities.

Wednesday, 9 Mar 2011

Arab Voices: What They Are Saying to Us and Why it Matters - James Zogby
8:00 PM – Great Hall, Memorial Union - James J. Zogby is author of the newly released Arab Voices: What They Are Saying to Us and Why it Matters as well as What Ethnic Americans Really Think and What Arabs Think. He is the founder and president of the Arab American Institute (AAI) and cofounded several other organizations serving the Arab American community, including the Palestine Human Rights Campaign, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, and Save Lebanon, a private non-profit, humanitarian relief organization. Following the signing of the Israeli-Palestinian peace accord in Washington Zogby served as copresident of Builders for Peace, a private-sector committee to promote U.S. business investment in the West Bank and Gaza. He writes a weekly column on U.S. politics, "Washington Watch," for the major newspapers of the Arab world. Part of the World Affairs Series.

From Idea to Novel: A Writer and Activist at Work - Rick Bass
7:00 PM – Sun Room, Memorial Union - Author and environmentalist Rick Bass is the author of more than twenty books, including the autobiographical Why I Came West and the short story collection The Lives of Rocks. A Texan by birth, Bass worked as a gas and oil geologist in Mississippi after earning a degree from Utah State University. His career as an author grew out of a pastime of writing short stories during his lunch breaks. In 1987 Bass moved to the Yaak Valley in the northern Rockies, where he has been active in protecting the land from roads and logging and serves on the board of the Yaak Valley Forest Council and Round River Conservation Studies. His first short story collection, The Watch, set in Texas, won the PEN/Nelson Algren Award; and his 2002 collection, The Hermit's Story, was a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. His latest novel, Nashville Chrome, draws on the rise and fall of the Brown trio, the true-life country music trailblazers who pioneered the 1950s sound from which the novel takes its title.