2005-2006 Colloquium Series!

The Colloquium Series is from 4-5:15 on Mondays. For those of you who have decided to take up Dr. Tamburri’s generous offer of earning a credit each semester (up to three credits possible and directed towards one of your elective requirements) for attending the colloquium series, there will be a required sign-in for each colloquium. Please remember to sign your name so that credit is given where it is due. We will be posting here the entire series, the speakers and topics and room numbers, as soon as it becomes available, so please remember to return to this page often!
------------------
Writing About Race and Change: A Conversation
Professor Kitty Oliver
Communication
Monday, October 10
4 – 5:15 p.m.
Seminar Room, SO 105

Abstract:

Communication professor Kitty Oliver discusses methodology, critical approaches and creative representations of community oral history as a means of investigating race relations and change. Her dialogue with students will explore the role of race and cultural stories in the context of social advocacy, the history and development of the Race and Change community oral history project, and the innovative course she will teach in the Spring for Masters and Ph.D. students, Writing About Race and Change (CST 7905 and COM 6906).

Oliver is an author, oral historian and veteran journalist who has been an FAU professor for nine years in the departments of English and Communication. Her book, Voices of America: Race and Change in Hollywood, Florida, is a collection of oral histories of Blacks, Whites and immigrants relating their growing up and race relations experiences. Multicolored Memories of a Black Southern Girl is a collection of essays on coming of age with integration. She is a writer/producer of PBS video documentaries as well as a cultural diversity researcher and workshop leader and her books and videos are used widely in the public schools as well as universities. Over 100 archival Race and Change interviews are housed in Special Collections of the African American Research Library and Cultural Center in Fort Lauderdale, including projects conducted by FAU students under her direction in Delray Beach, Boca Raton, parts of Fort Lauderdale, and the Lake Okeechobee area. She is currently working on a new book on civil rights movement memories.


From Immigration to Liberation:
German Émigrés in the U.S. Army during World War II
Dr. Patricia Kollander
History
Monday, October 3
4 – 5:15 p.m.
Seminar Room, SO 105

Abstract:
Most works on the subject of German-Americans during World War II have not gone beyond the generalization that the vast majority of German-Americans opposed Nazism. Recently, however, the field has been enhanced by works that have shed light on the plight of thousands of German-Americans who were sent to internment camps, and two books and documentary films have highlighted the experiences of German-émigrés who fought in the U.S. army during the war. None of these works, however, have provided a scholarly treatment of the experiences of émigré soldiers as a whole. According to the U.S. Military History Institute, these men comprised a large cohort: over thirty thousand men of German birth served in the United States Army during World War II.

This colloquium will discuss results of preliminary research on the memories of several German émigré soldiers who served in the European Theater of Operations. It will demonstrate the singular place that these soldiers occupy in the history of World War II and the history of Nazism. It will provide information on why these men left Germany, and how they were received in the United States as immigrants and as members of the U.S. armed forces. It will highlight their contributions to the war efforts in general and to the resistance movement against Hitler in particular.

-----------------------
The Black Middle Class in Predominantly White Environments:
An Examination of Communal and Individual Strategies
Dr. Art S. Evans Jr.
Sociology
Monday, September 26
4 – 5:15 p.m.
Seminar Room, SO 105

Abstract:

The structural changes stemming from the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s resulted in significant social and economic opportunities for African Americans, especially those in the middle class. Today, all State and Federal statutory barriers to blacks’ equal participation have fallen, and many of the social boundaries that once separated blacks and whites have become permeable. With the removal of race-based discriminatory practices, the black middle class was no longer forced to live and interact only in segregated social settings. Today, increasingly more middle class blacks live out a significant portion of their lives in predominantly white environments. The strategies used by blacks to help negotiate this social transition have been either communal or individual in nature. This work examines the positive and negative aspect of each of these strategies and their implications for social mobility.


For further information: 297-0155
-----------------

Economic Openness, Economic Openness, Volatility, and Political Democracy – Implications for the Compensation Hypothesis

Professor So Young Kim
Political Science
Monday, September 19
4 – 5:15 p.m.
Seminar Room, SO 105

Abstract:
A central assumption in the globalization literature is that economic openness generates economic insecurity and volatility. Based on this assumption, scholars of political economy have proposed an apparently counterintuitive argument called the compensation hypothesis. According to this hypothesis, globalization bolsters rather than undermines the welfare state by increasing social demand for state-provided social insurance against externally generated economic risks. The volatility assumption is dubious, however, on both theoretical and empirical grounds. This study, relying on the cross-sectional time-series data analysis for 174 countries, demonstrates that economic volatility is a mistaken link in explaining the positive relationship between economic openness and government spending. Furthermore, the study reveals that political democracy is a missing link in accounting for economic volatility; it reduces economic volatility in various ways, in particular, by putting greater constraints on policymakers to rely on drastic policy changes in response to an adverse economic shock.

-------------------
Florida Deconstructed
Dr. Simon Glynn
Philosophy
Monday, September 12
4 – 5:15 p.m.
Seminar Room, SO 105

Abstract:

Like much art, the artfully designed urban and suburban spaces of Florida, seek, as do similar examples elsewhere, to idealize material reality. Like the costumes and posturing of the ‘players’ who strut upon this ‘stage,’ these spaces exemplify life, imitating art, imitating an idealized form of life, or what Eco and Baudrillard would characterize as Hyperreal Simulacra of themselves! Indeed those raised in this ‘Dessert of the Real’ as Zizeck has characterized this environment, where iconic or visual media of outward display takes precedence over, to the point of eclipsing, the symbolic media of abstract thought and expression, are generally unable to satisfactorily script or thematize their lives. Consequently, along with other similar players in our globalized culture, they increasingly live their lives in terms of an ever narrowing and debilitating range of corporately contrived stereotypes in accord with which the Idolization of the Material increasingly replaces the Materialization of Genuine Ideals.