Special Events Archive (2015-2016)

Re-Writing Science: Communicating Science in the 21st Century is a professional development conference for science writers and an opportunity for UIC students to explore career options and network with professionals in the field. Attendees will learn about what science writing is, how to use statistics in their writing and what types of innovations in the field can lead to exciting careers for those in both the sciences and the liberal arts.

Session format: Panel discussion. Each panelist will be given approximately seven minutes to make opening statements about their profession and how they communicate science to the public. This will be followed by a short question and answer period by a moderator.

Full Itinerary Outline – Friday April 15

8:30 – 8:50 a.m.          Registration
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9:00 – 9:50 a.m.          Session 1

Track 1                           Panel Discussion

Title:                                 SciComm 101

• Jennifer Rupert, Moderator
• Katherine Parr, PhD, Lecturer, UIC Department of English
• Bill Burton, PhD, Senior Director of Public Affairs, UIC
• Bridget Kuehn, Freelance Science Writer
• Joe Harmon, Business & Technical Communications – Argonne

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9:50 to 10:00              Break
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10:00 – 10:50              Session 2

Track 2                        Panel Discussion

Title:                             The Business of Writing

How do I become a writer? Better, yet, how do I make a living as a writer? In The Business of Writing panelists talk about writing as a profession. Attendees will learn about how internships work, working in a writer’s environment and career options in the Chicago area.

Speakers:

• Linda Landis Andrews, Moderator
• Shegan Campbell, Co-Founder Kids Science Labs
• Margena Christian, PhD, Visiting UIC Lecturer
• Meta Brown – Data Mining for Dummies

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11:50 to 12:00            Break
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11:00 – 11:50              Session 3

Track 3                       Panel Discussion

Title:                               Narrating Environmental Justice

• Antonio Lopez, PhD, Executive Director – LVEJO
• Kellen Marshall, Pre-doctoral Fellow, UIC Inst. for Envir. Science & Policy

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12:00 – 1:00                Lunch

Date(s): Friday, 4/15 9:00 AM to Friday, 4/15 1:00 PM

Campus Address: Lower level Stevenson Hall

Address: 701 S. Morgan Street

Location: Chicago, IL, USA

Contact: Linda Vavra

Email: huminst@uic.edu

Website: huminst.red.uic.edu

Phone: (312) 996 – 6352

German Philosophy Consortium.For additional information please contact Sally Sedgwick

Before tar sands reach consumers as usable energy, they undergo extensive refining. Refineries like the BP Whiting Indiana plant or the Marathon Detroit plant are long-standing institutions that have recently been retrofitted to accommodate the shift of energy source.  They sit directly on Great Lakes waterfronts. Despite a  lawsuit by The Natural Resources  Defense Council (NRDC) and the Legal Environmental Aid Foundation (LEAF) of Indiana with help from the Environmental Law & Policy Center (ELPC) against the BP Refinery and a United Steelworkers (USWA) strike in winter 2015, few residents or consumers of Tar Sands energy know how refineries operate or relate to their host communities.  Since the host communities tend to be disproportionately poor and underserved, questions of causality immediately arise. Do refineries make communities poor or do they develop largely in poor communities? How do refineries impact the economic and political status of their neighbors and how can the neighbors’ concerns be heard by energy executives or, for that matter, by the consumers of oil?  Tar Sands come with their own byproduct, Pet Coke, a kind of coal produced by refining oil sands.  Pet Coke sits in exposed piles on the southeast side of Chicago and in Detroit, generating dust with deleterious health effects on those who breathe it.

Noah Hall from Wayne State University will be presenting the following:

The Great Lakes region has a complex and inconsistent approach to oil production, from drilling to transport to refinement. The region has significant oil resources that would be economically and technologically accessible through drilling in the Great Lakes, but with strong public opposition to drilling, it is mostly prohibited by both American states and Canadian provinces and the respective federal governments. The region is also a central part of the North American pipeline system for distribution and transport. After the Enbridge pipeline rupture decimated the Kalamazoo River in 2010, public attention has focused on the risk of pipeline failures, and existing and new pipeline proposals are under increased scrutiny and facing more legal opposition. Finally, the region is a hub for oil refining, building more capacity to process tar sands crude. While the law reflects public opposition to drilling, and legal fights over pipeline transport are building with public concern, the public and legal system have been slower to respond to the health risks of refining. Recent fights over pet coke storage in Detroit give some reason for hope, but the as the costs are disproportionately borne by minority and poor communities, environmental justice has not been achieved. The Great Lakes region must protect all citizens from the harms of oil production, at every stage, for the system to be both effective and just.

Thomas Frank from the Southeast Environmental Task Force will be presenting the following:

“A Toxic Tour”- For more than a century the southern shores of Lake Michigan have been home to one of the largest and oldest industrial regions on the planet – The Calumet Region. The existing conditions of the region lay bare the captured abuse of the fossil fuel age. And now in the late stages of the fossil fuel era, BP has built its largest refinery to date and the largest Tar Sands in the country. The BP Tar Sands refinery sits on the shores of the world’s largest freshwater resource, within the 4th most biodiverse region on the North American Continent and in what has become a densely populated urban community

Other presenters include:

Dr. Cecilia Martinez,
Center for Earth, Energy and Democracy

Lina Britto, Assistant Professor, Department of History, Northwestern
University. Her work situates the emergence and consolidation of illegal
drug smuggling networks in Colombia in the context of a growing
articulation between the country and the United States during the Cold
War. She was awarded a Martin Diskin Dissertation Award honorable
mention from the Latin American Studies Association in 2014, and a
postdoctoral fellowship from the Harvard Academy for International and
Area Studies, Harvard University. She is currently preparing a book
manuscript on Colombia’s first illegal drugs boom entitled “Trafficker’s
Paradise: Marijuana, Region and Nation in Colombia.” Her courses at
Northwestern focus on the hemispheric history of the drug trade and the
war on drugs; popular music and nation-state formation in Latin America
and the Hispanic Caribbean; oral history and terror in Cold War Latin
America; and the history of the present in the region.

Branching from the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, the 31st Street Collateral Channel is a highly  contaminated waterway located next to the new La Villita Park.  Due to decades of industrial dumping and periodic releases from a Combined Sewage Overflow, the channel currently releases methane and an awful odor into the air breathed by nearby residents.  After fighting for years to build La Villita Park and to close down the Crawford coal plant in their community, Little Village community members are now working with LVEJO to transform another major environmental injustice in the neighborhood.

Cosponsors:  Little Village Environmental Justice Organization, Humanities Without Walls, UIC Freshwater Lab, UIC Water After Border, Institute for the Humanities

October 26, 2015

3:30-5 PM Institute for the Humanities

Shout Out for the Humanities

Creativity Workshop and Information Session for
“Shout it Out for the Humanities” Student Contests

Why do you love the humanities?
Let us know by entering the Shout Out for the Humanities contests!

Come to our information session and creativity workshop to learn about the UIC on-campus and national contests, and to get inspired!

“Over $1,000 in prize money for the best submissions at the UIC campus level!”
Award sponsors:  Office of Undergraduate Research / Gender & Women’s Studies Department / Honors College

3:30-4:00 Informational overview about the humanities and the contests

4:00-5:00 Creativity workshop: explore our creativity stations to get inspired

Students should send submissions to uichumanities@gmail.com. If a file is too large, please send email to uichumanities@gmail.com. Directions for uploading the file to Box will be provided.

Professor Paul Cartledge, G. Leventis Chair, University of Cambridge

“A Tarnished Dawn? Ancient Sparta’s Perception Today and Tomorrow”

Sponsored by Classics and Mediterranean Studies with the generous support of Anita and George Skarpathiotis

Dr. Gregor Gysi, from 2005-2015 chairman of the parliamentary group of DIE LINKE in the German Bundestag and one of the leading politicians of the European Left

“Germany vs Greece? The Battle over Europe’s Future”
Presentation to be delivered in German with translation
Panel Moderator:  Leon Fink, UIC History
Imke Meyer, UIC Germanic Studies
Paris Papamichos Chronakis, UIC Classics and Mediterranean Studies
John Abbott, UIC History

Sponsored by Classics and Mediterranean Studies, Germanic Studies, History, School of Literatures, Cultural Studies and Linguistics, and the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation