Poetry in Silence
Grace Momberger describes how the story of one woman’s ability to make poetry without sound altered the way she perceived the very meaning of communication.
Sociology
Things Don’t Have To Be The Way They’ve Always Been
Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands was one of the assigned texts in my U.S. Mexico Border class this semester. In this book, Anzaldua writes about borders she encounters between herself and men, other cultures, and even her own culture as a homosexual Mexican-American woman from the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. She expresses a deeply planted love … Continued
Nola
My Humanities Moment occurred in 2005, the year that hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast. I lived in New Orleans pre-and-post Katrina and lost my house to the “Great Deluge.” I helplessly watched 85% of New Orleans proper fill up with water due to the 28 levee breaches throughout the city. The widespread flooding in … Continued
Contested Autonomy
The video clip I saw of a young Vietnamese-American woman who opened an art gallery in Vietnam led to my humanities moment. She said that her mother disowned her because of her decision to go back to Vietnam. I could relate this to my personal experience. My mother was very upset when any one of … Continued
You Cannot Copy That Map
In a lecture on the lived experiences of the local peoples of the area surrounding Dien Bien Phu in Northwest Vietnam, Dr. Christian C. Lentz, Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Chapel Hill, shared this map of the Northwest Region of Vietnam and a short anecdote about why this map is of particular … Continued
Human Ecology of Health
Walking the cobble-stone streets of a Bolivian village, I witnessed how a new clinic in a medically underserved area hadn’t made much of an impact. I was visiting a remote outpost to better understand the challenges in promoting health in poor Latin American communities. People come here only as a last resort because of the … Continued
Loss, Grief, and the Humanities in the Time of Pandemic
During this grief and loss, many are turning to the arts for emotional support, but the COVID-19 crisis is also a place for the humanities. Where the arts provide individual expression and connection, the humanities help us make meaning and find understanding on a collective level.