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Fourth Lecture of the 2024 First-Year Studies Lecture Series
No full textFirst-Year Studies, a staple of the academic experience at Lawrence University since 1945, continues to evolve. Beginning in Fall 2024, the course required for all first-year students will undergo a significant realignment, all aimed at making the program more focused while keeping its intent of a collective introduction to the liberal arts. The changes stem from recommendations made by a faculty task force that began its work in spring of 2022. It was approved in a faculty vote in May 2023. The revamped course, now lasting one term instead of two, will have a theme that stitches together the seven works to be studied. “Water” will be the theme for the next four years, then give way to a new theme. The writing curriculum has been reshaped with a sequence aimed at better preparing students for effective analytical writing. Works covered in this lecture: Back-Water Blues by Bessie Smith (Delta Blues Tradition) and Rising: New Dispatches from the American Shore by Elizabeth Rus
Using a Sociological Imagination to Understand Evicted
No full textThis lecture on Matthew Desmond\u27s Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City was recorded in January 2024. The lecture was designed for students and faculty in the First-Year Studies program. This program, a multidisciplinary introduction to liberal learning, has been a cornerstone of the Lawrence curriculum since 1945.
The lecturer, Jesús Gregorio Smith, is an Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies and an Associated Colleges of the Midwest (ACM) Andrew W. Mellon Fellow. He received his PhD in Sociology in 2017 from Texas A&M University where he studied the intersections of systemic racism, masculinity, and sexuality and how they influence mental and sexual health. He has published 25 various research pieces, including 14 peer-reviewed articles and chapters in such venues as Archives of Sexual Behavior, Aids & Behavior, and Issues in Race & Society. Jesús coedited a collection of essays through Lexington Books titled Home and Community for Queer Men of Color: The Intersection of Race and Sexuality Currently, he has a book contract with NYU Press for my first sole authored manuscript. Alongside his academic, he has published five op-ed pieces and public sociological works in such venues as Racism Review, Black Perspectives, and Latinx Talk. His research has been featured and his expertise sought after in 10 popular media presses including VICE, The Washington Post, and Rolling Stone Magazine. Similarly, he has given 15 invited talks/seminars/presentations and has won one national research fellowship, the Woodrow Wilson National Foundation Career Enhancement Fellowship for Junior Faculty
Communication and Collective Goods - Jeremy Waldron: The Harm in Hate Speech
No full textThis lecture on the harm in hate speech was recorded in February 2024. The lecture was designed for students and faculty in the First-Year Studies program. This program, a multidisciplinary introduction to liberal learning, has been a cornerstone of the Lawrence curriculum since 1945.
The lecturer, Mark Phelan, is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Lawrence. Professor Phelan joined the Lawrence faculty in 2011. In his lecture Professor Phelan discusses Jeremy Waldron’s book The Harm in Hate Speech. This is a book that provides a philosophical and legal framework for understanding the contemporary question of hate speech. One of the goals of a liberal arts education is to gain facility entering into close written argumentation about contemporary issues, and this work is a model of argument building. It also marks a turn in our approach to thinking about community. In this book, we examine a direct threat to any ideal community, and consider how words sometimes act more like bricks than as reasoned statements
Monoculture - screenshot of video
No full texthttps://lux.lawrence.edu/artgallery_se2024/1021/thumbnail.jp
A Tale of Two Austins: Negotiating Segregation in the Sapphic Community of Austin, Texas
No full textPast research on intersections of race and sexuality have been limited to heterosexual people and gay men, with limited research on racial dynamics in lesbian communities. Through an exploratory analysis of 10 in-depth interviews, this qualitative research study examines how racism and racial segregation are experienced by people of different races in the sapphic and lesbian community of Austin, Texas. In this paper I analyze results through Bonilla-Silva’s theory of Color-Blind Racism, May’s theory of Integrated Segregation, and Feagin’s Theory of the White Racial Frame. I argue that there is a broad pattern of self-actualizing segregation among my participants, whereby segregation of experience leads to reinforced social segregation. As a result of this finding, I call for a re-evaluation of how to respond to ongoing segregation in the post-Jim Crow era United States, one that considers both the subversive agency of people of color and the oppressive power of white people in social spaces, and how the politics of sexuality further complicated Color-Blind Racism
Transcriptomic Analyses of the Central Nervous System of Biomphalaria glabrata: BS-90 and NMRI
No full textBiomphalaria glabrata is a freshwater snail that is an intermediate host to the parasite Schistosoma mansoni, a parasite that infects humans causing a debilitating and neglected tropical disease - schistosomiasis. B. glabrata can either be susceptible or resistant to S. mansoni infection. The immune response of both resistant and susceptible B. glabrata to the parasite has been studied extensively, but the snail’s central nervous system (CNS) has not been studied much. Furthermore, research has shown that other parasites release chemicals in the host that ultimately alter the production of certain chemicals in the CNS. Therefore, we are interested in studying how the CNS of B. glabrata is altered by infection or exposure to the parasite. Using RNA-sequencing, we are examining the potential changes in gene expression in NMRI (susceptible strain) and BS-90 (resistant strain) snails in response to S. mansoni at 1, 2, and 4 weeks post-exposure. Additionally, we are examining whether there are differences in the CNS gene expression profiles between uninfected NMRI and BS-90 strains. Our results demonstrate changes in gene expression in infected NMRI compared to uninfected snails. Moreover, a surprising result that we did not expect was that there are differences in the CNS between uninfected NMRI and BS-90 strains