October 17 @ 3PM, A Film Screening and Q&A with “Mothers of No Tomorrow” Director Sixx King

Film Screening and Director’s Talk :
Mothers of No Tomorrow
October 17, 3:00 PM, Paley Library Lecture Hall

This film follows three mothers who lost their sons to violence. Prompted by the “loss of lots of friends” to violent crimes, Sixx King, a 35-year-old writer, producer, director, actor and activist, thought about what his mother would have to go through if something happened to him. Please join the Libraries and Blockson Collection for this moving documentary, followed by a discussion with King.

 

Sixx King

Temple University Libraries Explore Open Access, October 24, 3:30 PM in Paley Library Lecture Hall

The Connection between Open Access and Open Educational Resources: Exploring New Publishing Models

October 24, 3:30 PM, Paley Library Lecture Hall

The week of October 22, 2012 marks Open Access Week, a global event now entering its sixth year. It is an opportunity for the academic and research community to continue to learn about the potential benefits of Open Access, to share what they’ve learned with colleagues, and to help inspire wider participation in helping to make Open Access a new norm in scholarship and research.

Temple University Libraries will join in the festivities this year by bringing to campus two nationally recognized speakers who will share their expertise to create greater awareness about the current issues in open access and open educational resources. Both open access and open educational resources are movements designed to encourage the open sharing of academic content. Be it scholarly research or academic textbooks, scholars are increasingly becoming aware that there are multiple options for sharing their knowledge in ways that make it more openly accessible to the public.

To help our community better understand the issues we’ll be hearing from Nick Shockey,  SPARC’s (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) first director of student advocacy and Director of the Right to Research Coalition, and Nicole Allen, the Student Public Interest Research Groups Textbook Advocate and director of the Make Textbooks Affordable project. Since 2007, she has worked with students, faculty and decision-makers across the country to address the rapidly rising cost of college textbooks through grassroots organizing, public education and advocacy.  Nationally recognized as a leading issue expert, Ms. Allen’s research and opinions have been cited in numerous publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and USA Today.

Please join us on Wednesday, October 24 at 3:30 pm in the Paley Library Lecture Hall as we celebrate Open Access Week.

 

The American Idea on Politics, October 23, 2:00 PM in Paley Library Lecture Hall

A national election is approaching….please join us to consider The American Idea on Politics in a Conversation with Keya Dannenbaum and Hal Gullan, hosted by Robin Kolodny

October 23, 2:00 PM, Paley Library Lecture Hall

As another presidential election approaches, politics are on our minds. America’s founding values of freedom and democracy play out in intriguing ways in the 21st century media-saturated environment. In a world of sound bites, electoral fights, and bipartisan snipes, how can we best participate in a democracy and vote on the issues that are important to us? Panelists Keya Dannenbaum and Hal Gullan will discuss those questions and more on October 23 at Paley.

Dannenbaum is the founder of electnext.com, a site that translates political data into tools that help build a more informed, engaged, and effective democracy. Dannenbaum has studied and worked in politics from a variety of perspectives:  as a Stanford undergrad and Princeton Ph.D.; internationally as a Fulbright Scholar in Colombia and later in India; nationally in the 2008 Presidential election; and locally for the Mayor of New Haven, CT.

Hal Gullan is an expert on electoral politics, tracing back to his dissertation, “The Upset That Wasn’t-Harry Truman and the Critical Election of 1948,” completed here at Temple. Gullan’s most recent book, Toomey’s Triumph—Inside a Key Senate Campaign (Temple University Press, 2012) is a veteran political observer’s take on the Pat Toomey-Joe Sestak U.S. Senate race of 2010.

Robin Kolodny, Associate Professor of Political Science at Temple, will moderate the program. She is the author of Pursuing Majorities:  Congressional Campaign Committees in American Politics (University of Oklahoma Press, 1998) as well as numerous articles on political parties in Congress, in elections, and in comparative perspective.

The American Idea on Architecture: An Interdisciplinary Approach with MIT’s Skylar Tibbits, October 9, 12:30 PM

Portrait of Skylar Tibbits

Architect, designer and computer programmer Skylar Tibbits

The American Idea on Architecture:

An Interdisciplinary Approach with MIT’s Skylar Tibbits

October 9, 12:30 PM

Paley Library Lecture Hall, 1210 Polett Walk

Skylar Tibbits is an American architect, innovator, designer and computer scientist. He is a lecturer in MIT’s Department of Architecture and the founder of SJET LLC, a research-based practice crossing the disciplines of design, fabrication, computer science, and robotics.

This program is cosponsored by the Tyler School of Art, Department of Architecture.

More about our speaker:

SKYLAR TIBBITS is a trained Architect, Designer and Computer Scientist whose research currently focuses on developing self-assembly technologies for large-scale structures in our physical environment. Skylar graduated from Philadelphia University with a 5 yr. Bachelor of Architecture degree and minor in experimental computation. Continuing his education at MIT, he received a Masters of Science in Design + Computation and a Masters of Science in Computer Science.

He is currently a lecturer in MIT’s Department of Architecture, teaching graduate and undergraduate design studios and co-teaching How to Make (Almost) Anything, a seminar at MIT’s Media Lab. Tibbits was recently awarded a TED2012 Senior Fellowship, a TED2011 Fellowship and has been named a Revolutionary Mind in SEED Magazine’s 2008 Design Issue. His previous work experience includes: Zaha Hadid Architects, Asymptote Architecture, SKIII Space Variations and Point b Design. Tibbits has exhibited work at a number of venues around the world including: the Guggenheim Museum NY and the Beijing Biennale, lectured at MoMA and SEED Media Group’s MIND08 Conference, Storefront for Art and Architecture, the Rhode Island School of Design, the Institute for Computational Design in Stuttgart and The Center for Architecture NY. He has been published in numerous articles and built large-scale installations around the world from Paris, Calgary, NY to Frankfurt and MIT.  As a guest critic, he has visited a range of schools from the University of Pennsylvania, Pratt Institute and Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.

Tibbits is the founder and principal of SJET LLC. Started in 2007 as platform for experimental computation + design, SJET has grown into a multidisciplinary research based practice crossing disciplines from architecture + design, fabrication, computer science to robotics.

Libraries and Temple Contemporary Partner on Programs

The Libraries are delighted to continue their relationship with Temple Contemporary (formerly Temple Gallery) by co-sponsoring three programs this fall. These programs represent our commitments to bringing speakers, arts, and culture, in a variety of disciplines, to the Temple campus.

All programs take place at Temple Contemporary in the Tyler School of Art building, 2001 North 13th Street, and all require free registration.

How does Philadelphian differ from other dialects across the United States? Learn about Philadelphia’s place in American English with internationally renowned linguist William Labov.  What natural misunderstandings stem from the Philadelphia dialect and how is our accent changing in response to higher education and immigration?

Come early to test your linguistic knowledge with an interactive language display designed by Hive76 that features accents from across Philadelphia and the United States.  Also on display will be linguistically related works by Rachel Perry Welty and Sean Monahan.

William Labov is a University of Pennsylvania linguist who has been studying the Philadelphia dialect for the past 25 years.  Widely regarded as the founder of variationist sociolinguistics, his 1960s studies of African American Vernacular English remain some of the most respected linguistic research of the 20th century.

The Changing Patterns of Philadelphia English is scheduled to address questions of how Philadelphia talks to itself that were raised by Temple Contemporary’s Advisory Council.

This event is co-sponsored through generous support of Temple University’s Departments of Spanish and Portuguese, Temple University Libraries, Anthropology, American Studies, Geography and Urban Studies, General Student Activities Fund, and Tyler School of Art.

In partnership with the Art History, and Painting Departments at Tyler School of Art, Temple Contemporary is proud to welcome back Temple alumnus and renowned art critic Irving Sandler.  Nationally regarded as one of the most influential writers of the New York art scene, Irving Sandler’s books including The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism (1970), The New York School: The Painters and Sculptors of the Fifties (1978), American Art of the 1960s (1988), Art of the Postmodern Era: From the Late 1960s to the Early 1990s (1996) stand as the most lucid and critical examinations of the New York art world ever written.
Sandler will be specifically addressing the radical change that took place across the United States and specifically in the art world in the early 1970s.  This shift created the distinction that is now recognized as the development from Modernism to Post-Modernism.  Sandler’s illustrated lecture will be positioning this change into an historical context of cultural and political events that continue to be relevant to the discourse of contemporary art.

Irving Sandler’s visit is part of The Department of Art History’s Distinguished Art History Alumni and Scholar Lecture Series.

This lecture is co-sponsored by Temple University Libraries, The Art History Department, The Department of Painting, Drawing, and Sculpture, Temple University General Activities Fees, Temple Contemporary.

As the oldest street and square grid in the United States, Philadelphia has long been an active participant in the “rhetorical and operational openings” enabled by city public spaces.  On a macro level of media visibility- urban streets have become global stages for enacting political change.  However, on a micro level many of these same urban thoroughfares have themselves been engineered to segregate communities leading to increased civic unrest, economic disinvestment in urban centers, and a booming car culture.  How can we reconcile the uses of urban streets to collapse these disparities of scale?

Saskia Sassen will be addressing the question of how we can best occupy “the global street” for civic, environmental, political, and economic global gain.  Sassen, Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University, is one of the world’s leading authorities on the social consequences of globalization. Her meticulous and far-reaching work has encompassed immigration, new networked technologies, the dynamics of global cities, the changes within the nation-state caused by the “transnational” economy and the feminization of labor. Her work is characterized by the “unexpected and the counter-intuitive”, and she uses her research to cut through established “truths” that may not be what they seem.

The Global Street is co-organized by Temple Contemporary and Next American City.  This event is sponsored by Temple University’s Film and Media Arts Department and Temple University Libraries.

 

 

Learn About the Panelists for Chat in the Stacks “Teaching Diversity” Program on September 27

The Libraries fall programming begins on September 27 at 2:30 PM in the Paley Library Lecture Hall with a program on “Teaching Diversity,” part of the ongoing Chat in the Stacks series co-organized by the Faculty Senate Committee on the Status of Faculty of Color. Join us at 2:30 PM in Paley Library Lecture Hall. Panelists include Pamela Barnett, Tchet Dorman and Donna Marie Peters.

Dr. Barnett is the Associate Vice Provost and Director of the Teaching and Learning Center at Temple. She  recently published “Discussions across difference: addressing the affective dimensions of teaching diverse students about diversity”, (Teaching in Higher Education, 2011).

Tchet Dorman is the Director for the Center for Social Justice and Multicultural Education. He has had numerous experiences with middle school, high school and undergraduate students as a professor/instructor/teacher, administrator, counselor, and adviser. He has been the director or assistant director of several education programs designed to assist students in matriculating to and/or graduating from high school, college and graduate school while at Temple University, LeMoyneOwen College (Memphis, Tennessee), Swarthmore (PA) College, the University of Pennsylvania, Albright College, the Pennsylvania Institute of Technology, Vassar College, LaGuardia Community College, Oberlin College and Lebanon Valley College.

Donna-Marie Peters is a lecturer in the department of sociology. Dr. Peters received her Ph.D. in Sociology and an M.A. in Liberal Studies from the New School for Social Research, in New York City. She also holds an M.A. in Theater from the University of Connecticut. As a cultural sociologist, Dr. Peter’s articles and research interests include issues of aging, race, art, and culture.

The American Gallerist: Sande Webster on 40 Years with Art and Artists, October 5, 3PM

LECTURE–The American Gallerist:

Sande Webster on 40 Years with Art and Artists

EXHIBITION—Sande Webster Presents 4 x 10, the Work of Ten American Artists

October 5, Lecture, 3:00 PM, Art Sale and Exhibition, 4:30 PM

Program and Exhibition will both take place in Paley Library Lecture Hall

Join us for a conversation with pioneering gallerist Sande Webster as she discusses her more than forty years of experience with art, artists, and the cultural scene in Philadelphia. Webster has enacted her philosophy of diversity at the Sande Webster Gallery, originally Wallnuts, Inc. She was also amongst the first in Philadelphia to display photography, glass, clay, and textiles in a fine art environment. She has also long been an advocate of African American artists, and says, “[I]ndeed, with the passing of Kenmore Gallery, we were alone among the commercial galleries to exhibit the extraordinary talents of numerous African American artists, who, along with the ‘white’ painters, sculptors and printmakers were making a stir among the cognoscenti in and out of the city. Unfortunately, more than thirty years later not much has changed.” A true trailblazer, Sande joins us for Homecoming Weekend to share her ideas on art.

After the program, join us for an exhibition and sale, Sande Webster Presents 4 x10, the Work of Ten American Artists. Works by noted Philadelphia talents in mediums including painting, sculpture and photography will be for sale and featured during this show. Artists partaking are: Andrea Baldeck, James Brantley, Moe Brooker, Miguel Antonio Horn, Brian Dennis, Arlene Love, John McDaniel, Kathleen Spicer, Ron Tarver, and Mark Wallison.

For more than four decades, Sande Webster has been a torch on the Philadelphia art scene….[S]he has been a force for the commercial exhibition of photography, ceramics and textiles as art, and—perhaps most notably—has provided an uninterrupted outlet for the work of African American artists. —Philadelphia Inquirer

Sande Webster and Richard Watson

Sande Webster and Richard Watson, curator at the African American Museum in Philadelphia, looking over works of art.

Libraries Programming Begins September 27 with Chat in the Stacks Talk

Join us for our first program on the season on Thursday, September 27 at 2:30 PM as the Libraries and the Faculty Senate Committee on the Status of Faculty of Color present a talk on teaching diversity. This is one in a series of conversations that address the research interests and projects of faculty in a diverse variety of disciplines at Temple.

The American Idea on Sports And Race, October 2, 3:30, Paley Library Lecture Hall

The American Idea on Sports and Race: A Conversation with Larry Lester and Rebecca Alpert
October 2, 3:30 PM
Baseball—the great American pastime—also serves as a lens through which to explore and examine broader American ideas on race, heroes and popular culture. Join Larry Lester, a co-founder of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, and Rabbi Rebecca Alpert, associate professor of religion at Temple University and author of Out of Left Field: Jews and Black Baseball (Oxford University Press, 2011), to discuss the history of race and baseball. Lester has served as a curator and consultant at numerous cultural institutions, including the African American Museum in Dallas, Texas, and the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y. Lester authored The Negro Leagues Book (Society for American Baseball Research, 1994), which has been called “the most complete collection of information on . . . the Negro Leagues ever published.” Alpert has published several journal articles on Jews and baseball, was featured as an expert commentator in the film, Jews and Baseball: An American Love Story (Willow Pond Films, 2010, directed by Peter Miller), and is frequently consulted by the press on the subject. Both Lester and Alpert name Jackie Robinson as a hero and inspiration.

Zach Clayton sitting with members of the Kansas City Monarchs baseball team.

 

JUNETEENTH CELEBRATION

June 19, 2:00 PM The Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection, 1310 Polett Walk The Blockson Collection in partnership with the Department of African American Studies presents Dr. Allen B. Ballard, Professor of History and Africana Studies at the University of Albany-SUNY and Professor Emeritus of Political Science at City College of New York, who will talk about his publication and memoir Breaching Jericho’s Wall: A Twentieth-Century African American Life(2011).

Ballard’s publications include The Education of Black Folk: The Afro-American Struggle for Knowledge in White America (1973), One More Day’s Journey: The Story of a Family and a People (1984), and his two novels Where I’m Bound (2000) and Carried by Six (2009), winner of the “Honor Book Prize” in Afro-American Literature from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. The Blockson Collection will also honor the Montford Point Marines.