Children map the world, US students win International Competition

A map submitted by students, Landon Parish and Joy Jackson, to the 2009 Barbara Petchenik International Map Competition won for the youngest age group.

Hundreds of children around the world create maps for the international map competition hosted biannually by the International Cartographic Association.

Tanya Buckingham, the National Coordinator for the competition, and Assistant Director of the UW Cartography Lab in the Geography Department, stated "It is always difficult to select only five maps to send to the international exhibit from the more than 100 entries that I receive.

The children had a complicated theme to work with this year: 'Living in a Globalized World'."

The Barbara Petchenik Award was created by the International Cartographic Association (ICA) in 1993 as a memorial for Barbara Petchenik, a past Vice President of the ICA and cartographer who had a lifelong interest in maps for children.

The aim of the award is to promote children's creative representation of the world. 2009 brought the ninth competition held in Santiago, Chile.

This year's entries will be added to the web exhibition (http://children.library.carleton.ca) at Carleton University Library, Ottawa, Canada.

Category: Humanities & the Arts
Tags: ,

25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee: July 8-24

Save the date for University Theatre's summer musical, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, July 8-24, 2010 at the Mtichell Theatre.

The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee is a hip one-act musical comedy, which follows six young people in the throes of puberty.

The show centers around a fictional spelling bee set in a geographically ambiguous Putnam Valley Middle School.  The six quirky adolescents compete in the Bee, run by three equally quirky grown-ups. Throughout the show the misfits learn that winning isn't everything and that losing doesn't necessarily make you a loser.

Tickets are $14-$20 and are available by calling the Box Office at 608-265-ARTS or buying them online at utmadison.com

Category: Humanities & the Arts
Tags: , ,

Drewal wraps up residency in Norwich, embarks on DC fellowship

A beautifully carved Ifa divination tray from the Yoruba people of West Africa, filled with deeply symbolic imagery to delight the eyes and enlighten the mind. It is also a wooden drum that creates sacred sounds to attract cosmic forces.

Henry Drewal, Evjue-Bascom Professor of Art History and Afro-American Studies, recently completed his residency as Visiting Scholar at the Sainsbury Research Unit-University of East Anglia-Norwich-UK.

He soon begins the first phase of a six month Senior Fellowship (Summers 2010 and 2011) at the National Museum of African Art-Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC working on his latest book and exhibition projects.

The book project is on art and the senses, and the other is a major traveling exhibition of African art in iron tentatively called "Striking Iron."

The exhibition entitled "Kingdom of Ife: Ancient Art from Africa" —which he wrote the catalogue essay — is presently at the British Museum-London (closing July 6) and will begin its US tour at the Houston Museum of Art in September before going to Virginia, Indiana, and New York.

Drewal's exhibition "Mami Wata: Arts for Water Spirits in Africa and Its Diasporas" will open at Stanford University in August and remain on view until January 2011. 

Category: Humanities & the Arts
Tags: ,

Magaña wins 2009-10 Women of Color award

Sandy Magaña, director of the Chican@ and Latin@ Studies Program

Chican@ and Latin@ Studies Program Director, Dr. Sandy Magaña, was one of six winners of the 2009-2010 Women of Color awards.  

Magaña was nominated in the fall of 2009 by two colleagues, including Jane Dymond, and supported by colleagues, friends and associates. 

Magaña is a role model for Latin@ students at UW-Madison and is as a crucial resource for other ethnic minority groups, as well as non-minority students who are eager to learn and become involved in service learning programs in Dane County. 

The selection committee acknowledged that she advocates for the Latino population on campus and in the community through her work in the Latino Social Workers Organization, the Mental Health Center of Dane County and other programs.

Additionally, Magaña helped form the Latin@ Faculty Staff Association and serves as a mentor for several ethnic minority groups on campus.

Category: Humanities & the Arts
Tags: , ,

'Telling Our Stories' empowers high school students to write creatively

On May 6, 2010, several Madison-area high school students presented their creative writing pieces at the UW Memorial Library as part of the Telling Our Stories project.

Telling Our Stories, coordinated by Sociology Ph.D. student Mytoan Nguyen, connects UW-Madison graduate students and community educators with high school students to empower the youth to creatively write about their families' histories.

The intention is to help the students of immigrant and refugee backgrounds to learn about and document how their families came to Madison, Wisconsin, and the daily challenges and rewards that they experienced.

For many youths, the journey toward uncovering their unique family history helped enrich their sense of place in the world and enhance their tools to critically construct their own version of history and events.

A printed anthology of the students' work will be released this summer.

The creative writing pieces were composed on seven Saturday morning workshops where youths learned the components of storytelling and about the different creative techniques they could use to present their stories.

Telling Our Stories is supported by the Humanities Exposed Program, and has partnered with after-school youth programs such as GEAR UP and the PEOPLE program as well as a Room of One’s Own Foundation, the Madison Children's Museum, the Mess Hall Press, and the UW Departments of Sociology, Educational Policy Studies, Asian American Studies, and the Center for Southeast Asian Studies.

Category: Humanities & the Arts
Tags: , , , ,

11th Annual Greenfield Summer Institute 'The Wandering Jew' - July 11-15

The Mosse-Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies presents the 11th Annual Greenfield Summer Institute July 11-15, 2010.

This year's theme is "The Wandering Jew" focusing on the meaning and significance of Jewish wanderings from ancient times to the present.

Participants are coming from near and far for a week of summer learning and fun, including a concert by local klezmer band Yid Vicious and classes given by Jewish Studies faculty and guest lecturers.

Since Abraham's journey to Canaan, travel, movement, and migration have been important and recurring features of the Jewish experience.

From the Exodus to the expulsion from Spain; from Minsk to Ellis Island, Buenos Aires, and Tel Aviv; from home to homelessness, the Jews seem constantly to be on the move. Their fate as wanderers has been viewed many ways—as a curse (the Christian legend of the Wandering Jew), as a threat (Josef Stalin’s condemnation of the "rootless cosmopolitans"), or as a positive source of cultural vitality and creativity.

Jewish journeys have always been as much figurative as literal: as much cultural, culinary, and linguistic as geographical; and as much spiritual as material. Even conversion to or from Judaism may be under- stood as a journey: "Wherever you go, I will go," proclaims Ruth, the prototype of the righteous convert.

The Greenfield Summer Institute is sponsored by the George L. Mosse/Laurence A. Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies through the generosity of Larry and Roslyn Greenfield.

For more information, contact the Center at (608) 265–8150 or see http://jewishstudies.wisc.edu/eleventh-greenfield-summer-institute/

Category: Humanities & the Arts
Tags: ,

Enke awarded Feminist Scholars Fellowship

Professor Anne Enke.

Anne Enke, Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies, History and LGBT Studies, was awarded a Feminist Scholars Fellowship from the Center for Research on Gender and Women. 

This fellowship is designed to provide UW-Madison faculty working on feminist scholarship a one semester full-time research appointment. 

In fall 2010, Enke will work on: "Gender Changes: Transfeminist Activism from the 1960s to the New Millennium". 

She describes this project as "a history of transfeminist activism that establishes the integral relationship between feminist and transgender movements beginning in the 1960s".

Enke will trace how a movement calling for freedom of gender expression and transsexual rights took form within and alongside feminism. Like feminism, transgender liberation was deeply invested in the workings of gender, sexuality, and bodies, but its relationship with feminism was regularly contested.

Focusing on grassroots movement-building, one of Enke's driving questions is why, when transgender people were so often key leaders and participants in feminist efforts, the larger feminist trajectory is one of gender dis-integration as well as integration.

Rather than ceding the definition of feminism to trans-exclusive frameworks, Enke is compelled by feminism’s challenges to gender hierarchy, and by the feminist history of transgender movement-building, to offer a new historical framework that sees their interdependence.

Category: Humanities & the Arts
Tags: , ,