Faculty Shop Talks
Fall 2021
Presenter: Carlos Mejia
Title: “Fishing in a Lunar Crater: Writing and Translating Chapter Zero into English”
Time and Place: September 17, 2021 at 4:30 pm in the Interpretive Center
Abstract: This is a presentation on the process of fictionalizing scenes of public corruption, close family relations, and life sacrifices that take place in an industrial city in the riverbanks of the Magdalena river in Colombia. I will read an excerpt from the novel Fishing in a Lunar Crater –Pesca en un cráter lunar–, and address how the aforementioned themes are weaved into the narrative. In particular, I will be emphasizing how the text changed in the process of translation, in which professional translator Andrea Rosenberg (previous translations include The Storm and Difficult Light by Colombian author Tomás González) was involved. As early readers have emphasized the “Colombianness” of the text, the translation process has entailed a serious reflection on strategies to include and, also, exclude, specific types of readers. How can this text manage the specificity of its personal source and the aspiration of reaching a wider readership through imagery of personal accomplishments, failures, and fantasies? The excerpt I’ll be reading, called “Chapter 0”, serendipitously, turned out to be a somewhat premeditated effort to call attention to the exotism underlying magical realism –there are clear callbacks to One Hundred Years of Solitude’s family saga–, so closely associated with Colombian literary production (in international circles). In this process, I hope this text –as Derrida would put it in Specters of Marx– dialogues with the ghost of magical realism (and his figure García Márquez) to in some way surpass that exotism and invoke new ways in which imagination can connect us. This project was supported by a RSC grant provided by the Kendall Center for work carried out during the summer of 2020.
Presenter: Sean Easton
Title: "The Plundered Footage of a Fascist Film in Sohrab Modi’s Anti-Colonialist Sikandar (British India, 1942)"
Time and Place: October 15, 2021 at 4:30 pm in the Interpretive Center
Abstract: It has recently come to light that Indian director Sohrab Modi’s pre-Indian Independence Bollywood epic Sikandar, dramatizing Macedonian King Alexander III (‘the Great’)’s invasion of northwest India in 326 BCE, makes substantial use of footage taken from the Italian Fascist spectacular Scipione l’Africano (Carmine Gallone, 1937). Scipione was an historical epic -- and thinly veiled celebration of Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini – about Scipio Africanus, the Roman conqueror of Carthage. In this talk I examine how Modi uses the footage from the Fascist film to further both Sikandar’s anti-colonialist agenda (vis-à-vis Great Britain) and its World War II, anti-Axis agenda.
Presenter: Shu-Ling Wang
Title: "Fiscal Stabilization in High-debt Economies without Monetary independence"
Time and Place: October 22, 2021 at 4:30 pm in the Interpretive Center
Abstract: Fiscal stabilization without monetary autonomy can be challenging, especially in high-debt economies. This paper studies the welfare outcomes of six fiscal stabilization rules in Greece, a highly indebted country in a monetary union. We introduce rich fiscal policy instruments to a small open economy dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model and estimate it using Bayesian methods. Three results emerge. First, spending-based policy rules dominate tax-based rules in welfare terms, especially in countries with high public debt. The welfare gains are mainly driven by agents' expectations about the future fiscal policy stance. Second, the optimal stabilization policy, however, features a simultaneous adjustment of all spending and taxes. In case of negative productivity shocks, the optimal response is to expand public investment and employment, raise the labor tax rate while reducing government consumption expenditure and tax rates on consumption and capital. Third, sizable distributional effects are found across savers and hand-to-mouth households, with savers welfare gains being quantitatively greater than those of hand-to-mouth agents.
Presenter: Laura Triplett and Valerie Banschbach
Title: "Pipeline Pedagogy: Teaching about Energy and Environmental Justice Contestations"
Time and Place: November 5, 2021 at 4:30 pm in the Interpretive Center
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Presenter: Amanda Nienow
Title: "Understanding the Environmental Chemistry of the Troubling Herbicide Dicamba"
Time and Place: November 19, 2021 at 4:30 pm in the Interpretive Center
Abstract:. Agrochemicals are widely used around the world. For over 50 years, dicamba, 3,6-Dichloro-2-methoxybenzoic acid, has been one of the agrochemicals used in the United States, historically mostly on corn or grain crops. These early formulations of dicamba were listed as a restricted use herbicide due to high potential to volatilize, leach from soils, persist in ground water, and to cause widespread contamination of ecosystems. The use of dicamba decreased upon the rise of glyphosate (Round Up) in the early 2000s, but the recent development of glyphosate resistant weeds means dicamba use is increasing again. In 2016, Monsanto announced Roundup Ready 2 soybeans that can tolerate both dicamba and glyphosate. In April 2016, the EPA allowed the use of dicamba in sprays for these soybeans for five years. Despite conditional approval and restrictions on use, growing season 2017 saw the first use of Xtend soybeans in the US - and by the end of the summer, there were thousands of complaints from farmers on farms adjacent to fields where Xtend soybeans were used. Herbicide drifting appeared to be causing crop damage in adjacent fields. Despite the widespread damage (farmers in 21 states had been impacted), on October 13, 2017, the US EPA approved future use of Monsanto, BASF, and Dupont dicamba containing herbicides “over the top” of soybean and cotton in 2018. Dicamba continues to be used throughout the US, including here in Minnesota, on both soybean and corn crops. Farmers need to follow strict guidelines on how and when dicamba can be applied to try to prevent the big problems of drift (drops from the sprays landing outside of the field) and volatilization (resuspension of dicamba in air after application).
Though herbicide companies have to comply with EPA guidelines and have been conducting their own research into dicamba drift and volatilization, they do not focus on the fundamental chemistry dictating the problems or the environmental effects of post-application chemical reactions. For several years, my group has analyzed the chemistry of dicamba – in water, on plant surfaces, and, most recently, in air and soil samples. This Faculty Shop Talk will share the background story of dicamba in more detail, as well as provide some of my group’s chemical analyzes.
Spring 2022
Presenter: Maria Kalbermatten
Title: "Political Humor and Manipulation in Times of COVID-19"
Time and Place: February 18, 2022 at 4:30 pm in the Interpretive Center
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Presenter: Ursula Lindqvist
Title: “Unsettling Swedish-American Trauma Narratives in Dakota Ancestral Lands”
Time and Place: March 4, 2022 at 4:30 pm in the Interpretive Center
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Presenter: Betsy Byers
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Time and Place: March 18, 2022 at 4:30 pm in the Interpretive Center
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Presenter: Jeff La Frenierre
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Time and Place: April 1, 2022 at 4:30 pm in the Interpretive Center
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Presenter: Sharon Marquart
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Time and Place: April 8, 2022 at 4:30 pm in the Interpretive Center
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