If you're thirsty and have always wanted to know about looking for space microbes on Europa, what medieval people really thought about dragons, how to make energy from alternative sources, or what a philosopher has to say about what the heck is actually going on, come to Public Works! It's a free event in the style of Nerd Night but designed just for Ithaca. We're bringing a variety of intellectually-stimulating presentations right to you for your entertainment and educational pleasure at The Downstairs, the bar below The Watershed. Come hear talks given by Cornell and IC graduate students, professors, community experts, and everything in between! Each session will feature one to three accessible talks, followed by a Q&A session where audience participation is highly encouraged but not required!
Bring a friend, make a friend, ask an expert, and drink a beer!
The December 3rd Public Works event will feature 2 talks:
a culture and literature talk:
"Hominids, Humanoids, and Humans: A Semiotic Analyses of Blackness in Turkey"
by Mayowa Willoughby
Independent Scholar
Can black “things” ever be human? In his monograph The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism, Henry Louis Gates Jr. revises Saussure’s formulation of signification to explore the black concept of Signification. For Gates, the signifier Signification is associated with the rhetorical structures of the black vernacular, the trope of tropes, that is Signifyin(g), rather than with the semantic registers like in signification. Because the signal trickster figure, the Signifying Monkey, stands as the rhetorical principle par excellence in Afro-American vernacular discourse, Gates turns to the Signifying Monkey, in whose myth is registered certain principles of both formal language use and its interpretation, to explore the concept of Signification. In this talk, I revise Gates’ formulation of the Signifyin(g) Monkey to contextualize my own experience as an African-American assigned female at birth non-binary trans person who, when living in Turkey, was constantly referred to as ‘maymun’ or monkey by strangers and passersby.
and an astronomy talk:
"Searching For Ariel's Aliens With The Crispi Mission Concept"
by Zach Ulibarri
Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell
TBD
Time and Location
First Wednesday of every month, 7 PM.
The Downstairs
121 W. State Street
Ithaca, NY
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We want to hear from you! Come talk to us at a Public Works event or send us a message at ithacapublicworks@gmail.com. Are you an academic? Feel free to list your Public Works talk as an outreach event on your CV! Are you not an academic? We still want to hear from you!
