Loch Talks Archive
Spring 2016 Loch Talk
Dr. Antoinette Miller Director, Partnering Academics and Community Engagement Professor of Psychology Calling all Whovians! Are you in withdrawal with the BBC’s recent announcement they are delaying New Who until 2017? Do you miss your favorite 2000 year old (or 4.5 billion year old…) time traveler? We may just have the thing for you…haul out your sonics and your jelly babies. In 1963 the BBC launched a semi-educational program known as “Doctor Who”. It involved an alien being known only as “The Doctor”, who to all accounts was a vagabond outcast from an advanced alien race and his “granddaughter” Susan whose teachers followed her home one night… and the rest as they say is history. After seven Doctors and a too-long hiatus from 1989 to 2005 (except that telemovie in 1996) it has since continued its run, adding five more Doctors (yes, we count the WAR Doctor!) to the roster, and has successfully “crossed the pond”.
But it isn’t just for entertainment…it can be educational too. Come and hear one professor own her nerdiness and share numerous applications of themes, story lines, and characters from the show to a wide range of concepts in the classroom.
But be prepared. This will be an interactive session – nerds love company. And fair warning: Dr. Miller has been a fan of the show since she first discovered it in the mid-1980s…
Dr. Susan McFarlane-Alvarez Associate Professor of Communication Published in 2014 in Advertising and Society Review, this paper traces a long and rich history of human billboarding, examining past and recent advertising efforts that involve the human body as a site for promotion, or as a living component of persuasion. Resisting the temptation of apocalyptic judgment, the paper suggests these phenomena are expressive of new notions of human agency and free-willed choices, strategically leveraged to achieve relevancy in an increasingly saturated media landscape. “Human Billboarding: Peopled Publicity and a New Space of “Agency” in Advertising” seeks productive ways to understand this new form of corporate messaging as a strategy for addressing social realities through carnivalesque performance.
Fall 2015 Loch Talk
Dr. Susan Hornbuckle, Chemistry:
The Appalachian Trail (A.T.) is 2,189 miles long extending from Springer Mountain, Georgia to Mount Katahdin, Maine. It passes through 14 states, eight different national forests, six national park units and numerous state parks, forests, and game lands. Thru-hiking means hiking the entire trail within a single year. This past summer, Dr. Susan Hornbuckle, Associate Professor of Chemistry, completed an Appalachian Trail thru-hike. She saw bears, snakes, moose and many other animals as she hiked the trail. She will be presenting her thru-hike experiences and other Appalachian Trail information