Announcements, Happenings
February 28 : get in tune
February 8,2007
To the Campus Community,
I invite you to attend the USF Strategic Planning Town Hall Meeting hosted by President Judy Genshaft and Trustee Lee Arnold on Friday, Feb. 16, 1:30 - 3:30 p.m. in Davis 130. Here is the link to the strategic plan: http://www.ods.usf.edu/plans/strategic/. You will note that the section on governance which existed in previous drafts is no longer part of the strategic planning discussion.
This meeting is our opportunity to ask questions and discuss our role in the emerging USF System Strategic Plan. I urge you to participate in this session and share your thoughts. I am hopeful for hearty discussion and I’m counting on you to address questions that will advance our understanding.
I support your full participation in the meeting; a university is a place for civil conversation on all topics. However, I understand that a few individuals may feel uncomfortable speaking in a public forum. It is important to me that you participate, and there are several opportunities available to you.
I have spoken with our campus leaders, Michael Williams of USPS Council, Jim Stull of A&P Council and Gary Patterson, PhD, of the Faculty Senate. These officers represent your plans and concerns to me each month and can represent your voice here as well.
Members of USF St. Petersburg’s Campus Board also are planning to attend. They are coming to listen to your questions and comments in light of the interests of our campus and our people.
After town hall meetings across the system and input from all campuses, the USF Strategic Plan will be presented to the USF Board of Trustees for consideration. Once the plan is approved by the BOT, we will re-invigorate our internal strategic planning process to create a compact plan for 2007-2012 that is parallel to the system-wide plan and establishes our goals and strategic initiatives for the future.
I hope to see you there.
Sincerely,
Karen A. White
CFP: M/C Journal adapt issue, deadline March 9
click here for more information
'adapt'
'Adapt' immediately suggests the artistic notion of adaptation: reworking a work of art across the boundaries of media, audience, and context of presentation. But once shaken loose from its attachment to this narrowly artistic formulation of adaptation, adapt seems to structure virtually all aspects of our biological and cultural selves. Darwinism holds that an organism - over millennia - adapts new forms and behaviours in order to survive, while the business of global and technological living demands a sort of accelerated Darwinism on a scale of minutes and moments. We adapt into something, but what is it that we adapt from? Does stripping back the layers of adaptation ever uncover something not itself just another adaptation? And why is this (fiction of the) original so often given precedence over the simulacrum, the copy, the adaptation? Adapt sutures the poles of such cultural hierarchies.
Adapt also plunges us into the mystery of creativity itself, fracturing the illusion of originality to precisely the degree that it presupposes layers of difference infiltrating the universe's 'steady state'. Postmodern circumstances such as cyborg existence - a combinatorial difference - depend upon just such a concept of adapt, which brings things together without forfeiting entirely what tends to keep them apart. The ethics of adapt might be found in the way it opens the whole gamut of culture up to difference. For when it comes right down to it, isn't 'to adapt' the slogan of everything? Thought, writing, art: these seem inevitably products of adaptation, to the extent that an infinity of previous instantiations must always be assumed. All thought proceeds from previous thought, all writing from previous writing, and no art is ever born ex nihilo.
Our call for papers encourages contributions about adapt that themselves act as adaptations, revising whatever may have settled into a stasis of meaning. The following list of topics should be considered suggestive rather than prescriptive:
* adapt in cross-arts practice environments
* adapt as strategy of cultural and/or gender and/or ethnic identity
* adapt as mechanism of difference production
* adapt and nostalgia for the original
* adapt and case studies of adaptation
* adapt as resistance or submission to power
* adapt and new understandings of Darwinism
Details
* Article deadline: 9 March 2007
* Release date: 2 May 2007
* Editor: Patrick West and Jeannette Delamoir
Send any enquiries, and complete articles of 3000 words, to adapt@journal.media-culture.org.au
Thursday, February 1
Jill McCracken
Presentation: A Rhetorical and Ideological Analysis of Sex and Work: Poverty, Crime, and the Neighborhood
Davis 228
11:00 AM to 12:00 noon
open to the public