Virginia Tech Humanities Week

This round table conversation will focus on the various ways the humanities and martial arts intersect as objects of study, as part of lived practice, as richly signifying components of human experience.  It may include demonstrations both of martial arts and of VR video games involving martial arts, and discussion of literature.

From the wrestling in Beowulf to Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon, how people fight – how they move, how they train, how they imagine conflict and peace – has played a significant role in the human experience.  The Japanese concept of 文武両道 (bunbu ryodo) celebrates the way of excelling in both literary and martial arts, but the concept is not unique to Japan or even East Asia: medieval European chivalry or Renaissance humanism likewise celebrated both.  Scholars are beginning to pay more attention to the embodied human experience of martial arts, both in their own lives as people who are both scholars and martial artists, but also in literature, art, and history, where fight scenes carry far more information than may first appear to untrained audiences.   

Spencer Bennington is a black-belt in taekwondo who works on rhetoric and martial arts, particularly in hip-hop and videogames.

Kenneth Hodges is a professor of medieval English and an intermediate student of aikido. 

Drawing from two of Edgar Allan Poe’s most well-known works, “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Raven,” the installation explores what happens when literary texts are lifted from the “page to the stage” and then reimagined through the use of new technology. Inspired by Poe’s texts themselves, crankies (a 19th century artform in which a long, illustrated scroll is wound, revealing imagery related to spoken stories or songs), and shadow play (or puppetry), this installation explores the concept of shadow through text, image, and sound, including recordings of Virginia Tech students reading Poe's works.

Stop by at any point during the timeframe to experience the 15-minute looping display. 

This moderated roundtable discussion will feature the findings of original undergraduate student research from a Spring 2023 course. Students reviewed university manuscript collections and wrote an edited volume of chapters, highlighting the campus culture surrounding sexual violence during historical time periods and with different student population segments at Virginia Tech. Come listen to what the students discovered and what conclusions they drew, which were proposed as future action for the Sexual Violence Prevention Initiative committees launched this Fall.

Steve Inskeep of NPR's "Morning Edition, discusses his latest book, Differ We Must, which uncovers Lincoln's ability to bridge political divides. 

The event is sponsored by the Virginia Center for Civil War Studies and features a lecture from Steve Inskeep and a book signing.

For many, our current economic models no longer meet our basic human needs. Over the past two years, performance artist Steven T. Licardi and SPIA faculty member Ralph Hall have been exploring ways to advance new economic thinking – related to Community Wealth Building – through a SciArts project. Through this collaboration, they arrived at “Pingpongomics” and performance art as an engaging way to reveal economic inequality and challenge participants to imagine, explore, and develop alternative economic models.

Jordan Adamson, Assistant Professor at the Institute for Empirical Research in Economics in Leipzig (Germany), will give a talk with the title “A Practical Public Goods Mechanism for Policing.”

Lunch will be served.

Do you know when Hollywood stars begin to influence fashion?

Stop by and show off your knowledge of fashion history by matching clues like photographs and art prints to historical garments from our Fashion Study Collection! 

We propose to offer a hands-on demonstration in which the public audience can experience how advanced interactive technologies involving conversational AI can be used to understand and support human development, with a focus on young children’s learning. These emerging interactive technologies have been rapidly integrated into our daily lives, presenting both unprecedented opportunities as well as developmental concerns. To maximize their benefits and minimize potential harms, understanding human development in the context of technology is critical.  

Interact with our conversational AI agents deployed on smart speakers, computers, and tablets. These technological tools will read a children's storybook and pose questions to the audience based on a pre-programmed system designed by our team to provide educationally meaningful human-technology interaction. Explore our head-mounted eye trackers and wearable devices as we walk participants through the use of these methodological tools for understanding human cognitive processes.  

Given the growing use of technology in educational settings, we aim to provide the audience with the opportunity to observe how these new conversational AI technologies can be effectively applied in educational contexts to foster learning.

Why and how do miscommunications between speakers of the same language happen?  
Even though this it's predictable and unavoidable to some degree, why is (un)intelligibility socially fraught and ideologically-laden?  

Learn the answers to these questions and more from a linguist!

Drawing from two of Edgar Allan Poe’s most well-known works, “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Raven,” the installation explores what happens when literary texts are lifted from the “page to the stage” and then reimagined through the use of new technology. Inspired by Poe’s texts themselves, crankies (a 19th century artform in which a long, illustrated scroll is wound, revealing imagery related to spoken stories or songs), and shadow play (or puppetry), this installation explores the concept of shadow through text, image, and sound, including recordings of Virginia Tech students reading Poe's works.

Stop by at any point during the timeframe to experience the 15-minute looping display. 

"From Jail to Yale: Education is Humanization in the Carceral Context and Beyond" will focus on prison education initiatives and the power of a humanities education.

Bachelor’s degrees conferred by Virginia colleges in English, History, and Philosophy have declined by more than a third from the 2011-12 academic year to the 2012-22 academic year. (State Council of Higher Education). A likely factor in this decline is the perceived lesser availability of higher-paying jobs as compared to many other majors, especially those in STEM fields. Paradoxically, though, the recent rise of generative AI technology creates new and exciting employment opportunities for students in the humanities, including but not limited to “prompt engineer.” There is a need for human partners to manage and fact-check AI systems. This need is not going away soon, if ever.  Generative AI—despite its recent impressive achievements—is notoriously prone to errors, biases, and hallucinations, as well as to excessively second-handed inside-the-box “thinking” that misses creative possibilities. Why? Because an AI program cannot override itself to correct its missteps. Unlike AI’s, humans can override their faulty programming, especially by challenging the faulty assumptions that make bad critical thinking and break good creative thinking. This skill of overriding assumptions will be demonstrated interactively in this session.

LAHS 3984 Innovation Collab is a project-based class focused on guiding students to develop skills in technological innovation with an emphasis on public interest technology. Students work together to develop solutions to real-world problems provided by partners in industry (with Boeing partnership) and nonprofits.  

Students will present their conceptual solutions related to the broad project areas of Electrifying Air Travel, Collaborative Autonomy, Environment & Sustainability, and Healthy Travel. The assignment focused on enabling technology with regard to inclusivity and access for specifically identified public stakeholder groups.

Drawing from two of Edgar Allan Poe’s most well-known works, “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Raven,” the installation explores what happens when literary texts are lifted from the “page to the stage” and then reimagined through the use of new technology. Inspired by Poe’s texts themselves, crankies (a 19th century artform in which a long, illustrated scroll is wound, revealing imagery related to spoken stories or songs), and shadow play (or puppetry), this installation explores the concept of shadow through text, image, and sound, including recordings of Virginia Tech students reading Poe's works.

Stop by at any point during the timeframe to experience the 15-minute looping display. 

Sometimes, in a matter of minutes, we can find our way to the core of a conundrum, finding out the facts that a criminal has tried to hide.  

In this interactive session, we will work, individually or in teams, to solve a number of concise puzzles, matching wits with (fictional) criminals. The stories are invented, but plausible.  Our puzzle stories—according to the former warden of Sing Sing Prison—"represent a very adequate cross-section of the problems perennially confronting the law-enforcers.”

Examining the rhetoric and imagery of feminism, queerness, and witches in online spaces, across the political spectrum, we use iconographic tracking and visual rhetorical analysis to analyze how these various groups utilize imagery to stake their positions— with special attention to the imagery and rhetoric of witches, witchcraft, and queer-cryptid icons.  

As students in an interdisciplinary Ph.D. program who research various issues of social media rhetoric, this research utilizes our respective training in political science, gender studies, communication, Appalachian studies, and technology studies to gain a clearer picture of the role of social media discourse around the “queer” and the “demonized.” Join us and become bewitched.

Come by and enjoy a variety of foraged teas and bannock (breads) made from the Native Corn we grow in the friendship garden. We will offer samples from foraged plants as toppings for the bannock. We will have additional activities set up to learn about the ingredients involved, help us save seeds for next year's garden, and process acorns for upcoming tasting events.

Drawing from two of Edgar Allan Poe’s most well-known works, “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Raven,” the installation explores what happens when literary texts are lifted from the “page to the stage” and then reimagined through the use of new technology. Inspired by Poe’s texts themselves, crankies (a 19th century artform in which a long, illustrated scroll is wound, revealing imagery related to spoken stories or songs), and shadow play (or puppetry), this installation explores the concept of shadow through text, image, and sound, including recordings of Virginia Tech students reading Poe's works.

Stop by at any point during the timeframe to experience the 15-minute looping display.