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Upcoming Events
January 23 Lunch Colloquium January 23 WEBCAST - LC
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Contact Other Members
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find out about a travel destination or find other EUEC members who would like to travel with you, send an email to:
Find other members to get together for shared interests, whether it is forming a book club or a photography club, or getting together to take a hike. Send email to the following link to contact member who would like the same activity!
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This issue of our newsletter is sent to members and friends of the Emory University Emeritus College (EUEC). I hope the newsletter will help keep you informed about our activities and help you feel connected with our members throughout the U.S. On the left are links to our website and links to contact either me or the EUEC office.
With best wishes,
Gray
Gray F. Crouse Director, EUEC
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 Message from the Director
Our Lunch Colloquiums got off to a fantastic start with Hank Klibanoff speaking about his Cold Cases project. If you missed it, you can read Tolly Williamson's report below and also watch the video of the Colloquium. Our Colloquium next Monday will certainly be no less interesting and will hold a special resonance for our many members who in one way or another have been and still are associated with Grady Hospital. It feels as if we definitely need A Spirit of Charity in this country now!
Once again EUEC has been invited to display its members' art at the Schwartz Center this spring. We have many talented artists among us, and I encourage you to read the Call for Submission and to submit samples of your art. Those of us who are not artistically talented will once again be able to enjoy the displayed art and get a chance to talk with the artists at the opening reception on March 5.
If you have been at Emory more than a year or two, you have almost surely heard talk promoting interdisciplinarity. That is a great idea, but in practice there are so many barriers to interactions across schools, including the demands of one's own school or college, that most of us can only dream of fruitful interactions with colleagues across campus. Only in EUEC, I feel, can most faculty begin to experience interdisciplinarity. The latest evidence is the report in this issue of last fall's Interdisciplinary Seminar with the theme of 20th-Century Paradigm Shifts. It is fascinating to read how that theme is treated across the disciplines. If you don't want to wait until next fall for the next one, feel free to organize one this spring!
I am very grateful to John Bugge, Herb Benario, and Gretchen Schulz for help with proofing and editing.
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Lunch Colloquium January 23
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2017 Arts Exhibition
For the third consecutive year, the EUEC has been invited to display the artwork of its members in the Chace Gallery of the Schwartz Center this spring. A committee of EUEC members is helping to organize this exhibit. There are many very talented artists of all types in EUEC and we hope that you will want to participate in this exhibit. Below is the committee call for submission. Click here to read the call for submission below
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Interdisciplinary Seminar Report
The Emeritus College's fifth Interdisciplinary Seminar since the spring of 2014 had its last meeting of the fall semester on December 15, 2016, and its members have compiled a report of their presentations.
Click here to read below about the Seminar
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Are you concerned about your loved one who lives two states away? Do you find it challenging to arrange for services when you live elsewhere? In case of an emergency: what are your options from a distance? Long Distance Caregiving can be challenging physically, financially, and emotionally. This type of care can take place in a variety of forms--helping with finances, arranging in-home care, providing respite for a full-time caregiver, or helping plan for or respond to emergencies . . . the list goes on. Oftentimes long-distance caregivers feel helpless, overwhelmed, and guilty. During this webinar brought to you by Emory University WorkLife in conjunction with your Senior Care Management benefit, national caregiver expert Sherri Snelling will explain how to assess the needs of an older loved one who does not live nearby and begin to provide the support he or she needs. This webinar presentation will enable you to understand care options, determine whether relocation is appropriate, and discuss care options and critical issues with your loved one.
Register for our upcoming webinar here: January 20, 2017 12:00PM-1:00PM
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Walking the Campus with Dianne
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Lunch Colloquium January 23
A Spirit of Charity: Restoring the Bond between America and Its Public Hospitals
Mike King, Journalist As a reviewer for The New York Times put it, "Mike King's decades of experience as an Atlanta-based journalist covering health care in the South" prepared him well to deal with the subject of his new book, the trials and tribulations (and remarkable achievements) of this country's public hospitals. Though the story of such hospitals (including Atlanta's own Grady Hospital) is "a moving, ridiculously complicated target," King hits that target squarely, rousing "outrage on behalf of [these] continuously threatened [institutions]" that contain "the few square miles in this country where health care is an unquestioned right, not a grudgingly granted privilege." And it's good health care, too. Indeed, better than good. As Hank Klibanoff, a veteran journalist now a professor teaching writing at Emory, says in his review of the book, 'King shows that medical excellence resides where few people expect to find it," more than reason enough for us all to worry about the "misplaced public priorities and political mythologies" that would curtail, even end, the work such hospitals manage to do. It's no wonder that another Emory-connected luminary, Otis Brawley, has described King's book as "required reading for policy makers and health advocates alike." We look forward to hearing Mike himself share the story of public hospitals like Grady and also to hearing his views on how we might protect them and, better still, further advance the charitable purposes for which they were founded in the first place.
About Mike King
(from his website)
Mike King is a veteran award-winning journalist who has specialized in coverage of medicine and health care for more than forty years.
From 1972 to 1987, he served as a reporter, editor, Washington correspondent, and medical writer for the Louisville Courier-Journal, where he won awards from the National Mental Health Association, the American Heart Association, and other health groups. He was among the first Washington-based reporters to document the tobacco industry's efforts to pitch products to teenagers, young adults, and minorities.
In 1987 he joined the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's science and medicine staff covering health disparities and policy issues at the state and national level. In 1991 he and reporter Hal Straus were the first newspaper reporters in the country to examine death rates and access to care in every county in the South, documenting large differences in health-care outcomes among poor blacks in South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and the Mississippi River delta region, and among poor whites in the Appalachian mountain region of Kentucky, Tennessee, and West Virginia. The report won numerous state and national awards as the first to use computer-generated data and mapping techniques to illustrate health disparities.
In 1992, King became science and medicine editor and helped direct Journal-Constitution reporter Mike Toner's 1993 Pulitzer Prize-winning series about antibiotic resistance in medicine and agriculture. Later that same year he was named metro editor, supervising the largest staff of reporters and editors at the newspaper.
In his last four years at the Journal-Constitution he was a member of the newspaper's editorial board responsible for commentary on medicine and health policy issues. During this time, he wrote a series of "Saving Grady" editorials - 46 over a period of 18 months -- that outlined the scope of the problem with Georgia's largest public hospital and proposed solutions, prompting an examination of the roles state and local governments should play in addressing the issue of indigent care funding at Grady.
King grew up in Jeffersonville, Indiana, and graduated from Indiana University Southeast with a degree in political science.
A Spirit of Charity is his first book. Mike King and his wife, Shereen Walls King, live in Atlanta.
Click here for MIke's website
Click here to listen to an interview on "Closer Look with Rose Scott and Jim Burress"
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Lunch Colloquium January 9
Reconciling History: The Georgia Civil Rights Cold Cases Project at Emory
Hank Klibanoff, Professor of Practice, Creative Writing Program/nonfiction
Hank began by referencing the course involving civil rights cold cases he teaches at Emory in relationship to the way he approaches journalism. When he started offering the course, it was a journalism course, though Emory's journalism program has since been dismantled and the course is now part of a nonfiction program within the Creative Writing division of the English Department. He reminded us that he was not trained as a teacher but as a journalist interested in history. His goal is to see students grab hold of history and see how truth matters. He does not want students with high-minded ideas to see the course as a chance to vent feelings about racism but to approach the topic historically and write about it journalistically. And it is also an opportunity to teach narrative writing.
The question he raised early in the talk was, "How bad was the Jim Crow South?" He then proceeded to project the scene of an African-American drinking from a Black Only drinking fountain. That was minor compared to the daily degradation black people experienced because of their skin color. For example, in Leesburg, Florida, German POW's were allowed to sit downstairs in a movie theater while the African-Americans could only sit in the balcony.
He projected the faces of several men, whom he depicted as the faces of terror for African Americans (every bit as terrible as the face of Osama bin Laden). Sam Bowers in Jackson, Mississippi was the Imperial Wizard of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. He went to jail long after he committed his "dirty deeds." Dynamite Bob Chambliss bombed the church in Birmingham in 1963 but was not prosecuted until 1977. Others involved were prosecuted in 2002 for crimes committed in the 1970s. Those days were dangerous times, not just for blacks but for whites who expressed any sympathy for blacks. Hazel Brannon Smith (journalist, publisher, owner and editor of four weekly newspapers in rural Mississippi) remarked, "no one speaks freely anymore." In response to an editorial that she wrote, her building was bombed and her husband was fired from a high-profile job at a local hospital.
Hank next reminded us what happened in 1964 when three civil rights workers went to Philadelphia, Mississippi to help with voter registration. They were missing for 44 days before their bodies were found. They went missing on the first day of Freedom Summer but Ross Barnett, the Governor, dismissed the seriousness of the situation. President Johnson sent 200 to 300 sailors to dredge all the lakes in the state. They recovered the bodies of two 19-year-old men, college students, who had been strapped to a tree, tortured, and dumped in a river still alive with weights attached to their bodies. Charles Marcus Edwards told the truth about this incident and died in jail.
Hank continued his presentation by discussing four Cold Cases that he and his students researched. Other cases can be accessed through the website: coldcases.emory.edu.
A.C. Hall, a 17-year-old youth in Macon, Georgia, was walking with his 16-year-old friend, Eloise Franklin, on October 13, 1962, when they were stopped by the police for supposed suspicious activity. A.C. Hall was killed when the officers thought he had a gun. The police officers were charged with murder. The Coroner's Jury supported that charge, but the Grand Jury, composed of all white men, ruled self-defense and cleared the two officers. This story made the front page of the Macon paper.
C.H. (Clarence) Pickett, a 42-year-old man in Columbus, Georgia with known emotional difficulties, lived with his sister. He had been released from the mental hospital in Milledgeville. On December 23, 1957, a shopkeeper called to say a man was acting strange. The police arrested him, put him in jail, and beat him senseless when he refused to calm down. The doctor said he was just putting on. They sent him home without any medical treatment and he died two days later.
In 1958, James Brazier, a 31-year-old married man with four children, lived in Dawson, Georgia. He had three jobs; his wife two. He worked for a Chevrolet dealership and drove a "slick" Impala. The police stopped him often. He was arrested and beaten when coming to his father's aid when police had threatened the latter after church. When consulted, the doctor said he was just drunk, so the police sent him back to his cell without medical treatment. His wife drove him to a hospital in Columbus, but it was too late for treatment and he died. The NCAA investigated. Charges were filed but dropped and his wife lost her lawsuit. In the course of their research into the case, one of Hank's students located the full transcript of the trial.
Isaiah Nixon, a 28-year-old married man in Montgomery County, had six children under ten years old. In 1948, the first year African Americans were allowed to vote in state elections, two white men came to his house and shot him after learning he had voted for the "wrong" candidate. He was taken to the hospital but it was too late to save him. His wife and children moved to Florida. One of Hank's students located the burial site for the first time in 73 years, and Hank and his students arranged a reunion with his daughter, Dorothy, at the gravesite. In a recording, she shed tears and expressed gratitude for their work, which motivated her to add a proper headstone.
The presentation was most interesting and informative - especially in relationship to happenings in our own time. Hank brought copies of his book, The Race Beat, which he co-authored with Gene Roberts and which won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 2006. And, of course, "the beat goes on."
He concluded his talk with a quote from T.S Eliot, "After such knowledge, what forgiveness?"
--Tolly Williamson
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2017 Arts Exhibition
Call for Submission
The 2017 Emory University Emeritus College Art Exhibit will showcase works of art created by members of the Emory Emeritus College community. It is a juried exhibit that will hang in the Chace Gallery of the Donna and Marvin Schwartz Center for Performing Arts during March of this year. We would like the focus of this exhibition to be artwork that has been created in retirement.
Artwork for Exhibition
Art works for the exhibition must be ready for hanging on the walls of the Chace Lobby and must be framed (if appropriate). There are no facilities for permanent exhibition of other types of artwork, such as sculpture or carvings. However, for the reception, we will have spaces in which works that do not hang can be displayed, and we encourage submission of any type of work that could be displayed during the reception. The Schwartz Center is locked when not in use. However, the Chace Lobby is a public space. Although in general there have not been problems with the security of any hung art, it is not possible to guarantee the safety of any submitted art. Jpeg photographs of artwork should be submitted by the deadline.
Guidelines for Participation
Entry deadline: Friday, February 3 by 5 PM
Artists may submit photographs (in jpeg format) of up to three works of art in any medium. No single work may exceed 34 inches in any direction.
The application should include:
1-A separate jpeg (plus any detail shots) for each work submitted
2-Documentation list of images: Name. Title. Date. Media. Dimensions.
3-Contact information: Name, address, phone numbers, email address.
Applications may be submitted online to emeriti@emory.edu or by a packet delivered to the Emeritus College Offices at The Luce Center, 825 Houston Mill Road NE #232, Atlanta, GA 30329. For initial judging, do not send original works of art; digital images are preferred.
Selection and Delivery:
The committee will notify artists about the inclusion of their work in the exhibit.
Works accepted for the exhibit must be delivered to the Emeritus College Offices at The Luce Center by 5 p.m. on Friday, February 17. If you are willing to ship your artwork, EUEC members who live anywhere can participate in this exhibition! Work must arrive ready for presentation, framed, and ready to hang if suitable. Installation instructions, if needed, should be included. You may have your work shipped to the office if you prefer not to deliver it yourself.
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Interdisciplinary Seminar Report
REPORT: THE INTERDISCIPLINARY SEMINAR on 20th-CENTURY PARADIGM SHIFTS The Emeritus College's fifth Interdisciplinary Seminar since the spring of 2014 had its last meeting of the fall semester on December 15, 2016. The overall topic for the seminar was "Twentieth-Century Paradigm Shifts," courtesy of a fertile suggestion from Marilynne McKay, which had been to take a longitudinal view of the last century, identifying events, trends, and major discoveries that had profound and lasting influence. This was narrowed and refined a bit to the concept of "paradigm shifts" - deep-structural inflections or realignments of academic fields and disciplines that have changed the way we understand what they do and are about, and consequently how we now conduct research, interpretation, and commentary. What follows is a quick rundown of what each member of the seminar chose to focus on as an important "paradigm shift," presented in chronological order starting with our first meeting on September 22. Selden Deemer (Emory Libraries) noted that a search for the origins of the phrase "paradigm shift" led quickly back to Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Selden graciously agreed to take the first session and to use the Kuhn book as a kind of keynote for the whole semester. One possible problem, as noted by a contributor to a book on Kuhn's influence, was that "[I]f someone offers you the opportunity to speak briefly about the one figure about whom everyone in your proposed audience has strong and settled opinions, think at least twice before you say yes." However, despite strong and settled opinions on Kuhn from some of us, Selden did us the invaluable service of "setting the table" for all subsequent discussions this fall. On September 29 Don McCormick (Biochemistry) led a discussion on the Scientific Bases for the Interplay of Life and Death on Evolution. The main reading for the session was Jules Howard's Death on Earth: Adventures in Evolution and Mortality (2016), whose cool Olympian view, however lightheartedly presented, is that "Death is the process through which more life is created," and that it therefore plays an essential role in evolution. Don's main point concerned the paradigm shift in evolutionary biology from a classic anatomic/taxonomic approach to one dependent on molecular biology, biochemistry, and molecular genetics. In the latter paradigm, "survival of the fittest" takes place at the level of the cell, as the Second Law of Thermodynamics kicks in as soon as we are born: telomeres (end caps of chromosomes) shorten, damage from free radicals (generally harmful to DNA and in mitochondria) accumulates, and we encounter things inside and out that want to do us in.
John Juricek (History) was up next, on October 6, speaking about ethnohistory - a hybrid discipline resulting from a paradigm shift in historiography, which unlike many disappointing experiments with "interdisciplinary" study, began with a problem, not a theory. The problem was how to interpret the land rights of American Indians in a way that would entitle them to compensation from the 1946 U. S. Indian Claims Commission. The problem was urgent: the enabling Act of Congress gave the Commission just five years to hear testimony and make decisions in hundreds of cases. Lawyers were useless here, since the issue was one of equity, not law, and the decision would be made by commissioners, not judges. The only scholars who knew enough about the background to the land claims were anthropologists and historians, who at mid-twentieth century were happily indifferent to each other's work: anthropologists relied on oral testimony from living Indians, while historians relied on documents - written mainly by non-Indians. The pressing deadline (it would be extended repeatedly) forced these awkward partners into a marriage of necessity - "ethno-history" - and a productive joint response. The results were success for many Indian claimants; the founding of the American Society for History; and a dramatic broadening of all later investigations into Indian culture and history.
On October 13 Rudi Makkreel (Philosophy) offered a challenging discussion of "worldviews" (Weltanschauungen) as metaphysical paradigms, in effect, invoking the thought of the German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey, about whose influence Rudi is in fact the world's leading expert. Since Thomas Kuhn compares a paradigm shift (one that reorganizes what scientists know) to a change in worldview, Rudi felt justified turning to Dilthey, who posited and analyzed three worldview types that have recurred in the history of Western metaphysics - based on whether cognitive, evaluative, or volitional interests are dominant. Rudi noted a similar shift away from synthetic metaphysical systems four decades later when Wittgenstein claimed that speculative philosophers need "linguistic therapy." That is, ordinary language analysis teaches that there is no essence that unites the various senses of a word like "game." At best, different games show only "family resemblances." As with language, similar claims have been made about the concept of art: traditional aesthetic definitions of art have been reduced to subjective critical recommendations about what is novel in individual works of art. In sum, twentieth-century philosophy has largely replaced synthesis with analysis - a truly major paradigm shift.
On October 20, Linda Hubert (English, Agnes Scott) directed attention to "The Lasting Impact and Implications of American Literary Naturalism," maintaining that it constituted a "seismic shift in sensibility." In an extremely rich analysis, Linda sketched the main outlines of the philosophical worldview of naturalism, consisting of equal parts: Darwinian - and social-Darwinist - pessimism ("the beast in the jungle," "survival of the fittest"); fatalistic determinism (the "pawn on the chessboard"); and diminishment of the concept of human nature (the "brute within," materialism, the "death of God"). The American writers most heavily committed to naturalism around the turn of the twentieth century were Stephen Crane, Jack London, Frank Norris, and Theodore Dreiser, while in the 'twenties and later the works of such mainstream writers as Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Steinbeck, and Eugene O'Neill continued to display the impact of the movement. Participants were asked to read London's "To Build a Fire" (1908), a classic short exemplar of naturalist fiction, but were also pointed in many different and rewarding directions by Linda's exceptional bibliography, which included references to mainline critical works, YouTube trailers for naturalistic films like They Shoot Horses, Don't They, David Denby's New Yorker appreciation of Dreiser's American Tragedy, and a 2015 novel by the Hawaiian-born author Hanya Yanagihara. (A few days after Linda's session, Delia Nisbet sent participants copies of a report she had not been able to share during the session, describing the earlier rise of Naturalism in Europe and in Germany in particular, and recommending three authors representing the movement: Gerhard Hauptmann, Theodor Storm, and Theodor Fontane.) Marilynne McKay (Medicine) addressed twentieth-century advances in digital communication and search technology in the October 27th session. She concentrated on Google (now Alphabet), the data-gathering behemoth that integrated information management and communication with the ultimate goal of "having the entire world's knowledge connected directly to your mind." We learned how Internet searching works and how we often limit our search parameters even as we give up both control and privacy in our desire for a "tailor-made" experience. Readings and videos on machine learning, human-computer cooperation, and the mind-boggling future of Artificial Intelligence (AI), evoked a lively discussion on what it all might mean for us and future generations. The session was so rich that it provoked one of our regular "visitors" to the seminar, Don O'Shea, to offer an additional meeting on the "digital shift" in how twenty-first-century humans pay attention to their world (see below). On the third of November Woody Hickcox (Environmental Science) led a seminar on the most important paradigm shift in geology, the shift to plate tectonics, which took place with breathtaking speed over the course of merely one decade, the 1960s. It explained the origins of mountain ranges (Woody's particular area of research) better than the older geosynclinal theory of mountain-building, which was quickly abandoned. A basic tenet of plate tectonics is that the continents move about - "drift" - across the surface of the globe as upwelling in the mantle continually adds new oceanic crust along the extensive system of mid-oceanic ridges. In a fascinating sidelight, Woody suggested that a preliminary but flawed version of the theory of continental drift had been articulated as early as 1912 by Alfred Wegener, a respected German atmospheric physicist, and had gained widespread acceptance almost everywhere except in North America. Why not in North America? In part because, as Naomi Oreskes suggests in her book The Rejection of Continental Drift (1999), North American geologists had a bias for empirical science and a corresponding prejudice against theories enunciated from on high by respected Big Names in the European firmament. More important, Wegener's evidence supporting continental drift originated almost entirely on land - on those very drifting continents. But the new paradigm of plate tectonics was fueled largely by evidence gleaned from the oceans, this coming as a result of the development of undersea technologies during World War II and from funds that became available to scientists during the Cold War. On November 10 Gretchen Schulz (English, Oxford) discussed a major paradigm shift in literary studies under the rubric "The Culture Wars, Great Books, and Not-So-Great Books." She had participants read a review of, and selections from, Andrew Hartman, A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars (2015); she also had us reconsider Allan Boom's controversial The Closing of the American Mind and Harold Bloom's The Western Canon, as well as syllabi from the Great Books programs at St. John's College and Columbia - all examples of a close-to-ideal version of what a liberal education in the Western tradition should consist of. The Hartman reading suggested that the Culture Wars were the "defining metaphor for the late twentieth-century United States," as a "more pluralistic, more secular, more feminist America" began to be constructed atop "the ruins of normative America." It also argued that the Culture Wars are now pretty much over, a conclusion we grappled with in the shadow of the national election that had taken place just two days before! In the second hour the seminar discussion turned to a sort of academic memoir Gretchen had asked all of us to read, an overview of her experience as both student and faculty member in English departments through the last four decades of the twentieth century as the Culture Wars raged over the composition of the literary canon. We concluded - and most of us did so with a sense of loss for the present generation of students - that, judging by the shape of the general-education curricula now encountered in American universities, defenders of the traditional canon lost this battle long ago. On November 17 Jim Roark (History) led a seminar session on what he called the Racial Turn in understanding U.S. history, in his view the most important change in the sub-discipline ever. His introduction to the topic, and the readings he assigned, made it clear that for centuries, U.S. history was unrelentingly monochromatic - white and decidedly Eurocentric. But beginning in the 1960s, historians discovered color, specifically African Americans, and began to tell a very different story of America. Slavery, for example, once seen as a benevolent institution with responsible masters and grateful slaves, was recognized as a brutal and violent abomination. Rather than being considered passive victims, enslaved people were now seen as having fought back and having become crucial actors in their own liberation. Jim noted that getting American history right is important to us all, for as James Baldwin recognized, "the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are consciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do." On the first of December sudden health problems prevented Delia Nisbet (Languages, Oxford) from presenting her seminar on Futurism (Il Futurismo), an artistic and social movement originating in Italy in the early twentieth century which embraced youth, speed, technology, and violence, and which venerated such new marvels as the automobile, the airplane, and the industrial city. She was able to offer a brief report on the history preceding the movement at the start of John Bugge's seminar on December 8, history that served as an interesting prelude to his discussion of modernism and postmodernism in this country. On February 2 the group will reunite for Delia's presentation on the Italian movement and its reflection in architecture in particular. On December 8 John Bugge (English) led a seminar on the mid-twentieth-century shift from modernism to postmodernism both in architecture and in literature, with aspirations toward a kind of comparative approach. He began with modernism as a full-bore rebellion against late-Victorian and Edwardian pieties and certainties, one provoked by the apocalyptic disaster of the Great War, which seemed to have reduced all Western culture (in the words of Ezra Pound) to "an old bitch gone in the teeth, / . . . a botched civilization" amounting to no more than "two gross of broken statues" and "a few thousand battered books." Pound's injunction for artists of all stripes, then, was to "make it new," and that is what modernists did - in painting and poetry and the novel, in music and sculpture, and in architecture as well. T. S. Eliot's 1922 "The Waste Land" served as the prototypical modernist poem. And then, to illustrate the transition to literary postmodernism, Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot (1948) was pressed into service as perhaps the best-known absurdist play, to showcase such postmodern characteristics as "the death of the author"; language as no more than word games devoid of significance; skepticism toward all master narratives (e.g. Christianity's: redemption); and the human condition depicted as clueless, pointless waiting. Taking inspiration from Marilynne McKay's session on digital communication, in a final, extra seminar on December 15, Don O'Shea (Physics, Georgia Tech), explored the concept of "digital attention" by encouraging members of the seminar to compile a "digital diary" of the sites we typically visit on the Internet, focusing on how we inform and entertain ourselves post-the-information revolution. He noted that all of us experienced first-hand the shift from an analog world (print, radio, TV) to a digital world (Internet, social media, rapid news delivery, cultural isolation). Thus, we dutifully began with our reports on the sort of media we paid attention to before the shift, then explained how we get our news and entertainment now. Overall, we concluded that this particular cohort of retired faculty have little truck with social media, and that we generally prefer printed to electronic books. But it was illuminating to learn that beyond our almost universal addiction to email, and to news on the Web, we also exhibit a surprisingly wide-ranging and idiosyncratic taste for web sites, the composite list of which produced curiosity, applause, and occasionally raised eyebrows. To sum up, all participants in this last fall's seminar on Paradigm Shifts seemed to agree that it fulfilled the overarching purpose of these Interdisciplinary Seminars, which is to bring together members of the Emeritus College in scholarly interchange to expand their conceptual horizons and further their continuing intellectual growth and development as still-active members of the professoriate. The topic for next fall's Interdisciplinary Seminar has not been determined. If you have a big, general topic in mind that might be suitable for this kind of undertaking, please be in touch with John Bugge about it at engjmb@emory.edu. And, of course, also consider taking part yourself! --JMB Click here to return to top
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Walking the campus with Dianne
I'm sure almost everyone recognized our last photo as the stairs of the Schwartz Center. The building is quite lovely, with a warm and inviting color scheme. You can find classic statues as well as beautiful art and music in this structure. I've provided a few extra photos below featuring different areas of the building. And yes, that's our own Dr. Al Padwa peeping through the opening between floors during a past Emeritus Art Reception!
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Emory University Emeritus College The Luce Center
825 Houston Mill Road NE #206 Atlanta, GA 30329 |
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