UMBC Student Leads Veterans Working with Baltimore Communities

The 6th Branch recently announced a partnership with Got Your 6, a national campaign encouraging veterans and civilians to work together in bettering their communities.

Dave Landymore ’13, human geography, executive director of The 6th Branch, describes the group as a “veteran-led community service organization” that uses “military leadership skills to motivate and lead volunteers from all walks of life in an effort change the conversation about what is achievable and what isn’t.”

The partnership will focus on the Got Your 6 leadership pillar “The Mission Continues,” with the hope that The 6th Branch will involve veterans and their families in 1.5 million hours of community service by July 2013. Also participating are other organizations includingTeam Rubicon and The Corporation for National and Community Service.

“We’ve seen some terrible things in places like Iraq and Afghanistan; some of those things we see here at home as well. As veterans, we can’t abide letting our fellow citizens who live in substandard conditions continue to believe there’s no hope for them,” Landymore said.

Recent activities by The 6th Branch include “Operation: Oliver,” which focused on bettering the Oliver neighborhood of Northeast Baltimore. Jeremy Johnson ’12, sociology, was active in this effort.

Kevin Kallaugher, Artist-in-Residence, in Financiarul

Kevin “KAL” Kallaugher, UMBC artist-in-residence and cartoonist for The Economist and The Baltimore Sun, is exhibiting his work at the National Museum of Contemporary Arts in Bucharest, and was co-organized with the U.S. Embassy in Romania. The exhibit opened May 15.

The exhibit was covered by Financiarul on May 17, with the newspaper writing that it portrays “a wide range of themes, including American symbols, the fight against terror, the American economy and big corporations, the US in a world context as well as American political leaders.”

The English-language version of the article can be found here.

William LaCourse, College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences, in the Baltimore Business Journal

William LaCourse, Interim Dean of the College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences, was in last Friday’s Baltimore Business Journal. The section of the story, titled STEM programs try to build the workforce of the future, on LaCourse and UMBC focused on the creation of the Chemistry Discovery Center.

“LaCourse and his colleagues developed the Chemistry Discovery Center, an adjunct to the traditional introductory chemistry lecture course. At weekly, two-hour sessions students are randomly paired into teams to solve problems. Each student rotates through roles of supervisor, recordkeeper, data collector and result disseminator. Instructors answer questions but they don’t lecture. The rotating roles have promoted a sense of accountability, which LaCourse thinks has been key to the program’s success. The failure rate in his Chemistry 101 class has been halved, from 30 to 15 percent; the number of chemistry majors at UMBC has doubled, to 160.”

To read the article (subscription required) go to: Higher Learning: STEM programs try to build the workforce of the future.

Shawn Bediako, Psychology, Named to Advisory Board of the Center for the History of Psychology

Shawn Bediako, associate professor of psychology, has been named to the advisory board of the Center for the History of Psychology (CHP).  The CHP, which is located at The University of Akron, provides access to and interprets the historical record of psychology and related human sciences.  It is home to a museum of psychology and the Archives of the History of American Psychology.

“I’ve always had an interest in the history of psychology,” said Bediako. “I use my interest in history to balance out the rigors of doing research.”

Bediako came to the center’s attention in 2008, when he planned a celebration to mark the 75th anniversary of the first African American woman earning her doctorate in psychology. As a member of the advisory board, Bediako hopes to add the stories of minority psychologists to the larger history of the discipline.

“We have to stop looking at the experiences of marginalized groups as being separate from the larger history of the discipline,” he said.

The CHP advisory board assists the center in matters of collection management, public outreach, and development.

University Counseling Services Closing (5/30)

University Counseling Services will be temporarily closed Wednesday, May 30, 2012 from 9 a.m.-11 a.m. to attend an on-campus meeting at UHS. Staff will be available by phone ext. 5-2472 during this time. If you are having an emergency, you can also call campus police at 410-455-5555. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact Dr. Patricia Wick at ext. 5-2472 or drwick@umbc.edu.

Ryan Bloom, English, in the New Yorker

English lecturer Ryan Bloom was recently published on the New Yorker’s “Page-Turner” blog. His post, “Lost in Translation: What the First Line of ‘The Stranger’ Should Be” discusses the first sentence of Albert Camus’s book.

“Within the novel’s first sentence, two subtle and seemingly minor translation decisions have the power to change the way we read everything that follows. What makes these particular choices prickly is that they poke at a long-standing debate among the literary community: whether it is necessary for a translator to have some sort of special affinity with a work’s author in order to produce the best possible text,” he writes, ultimately concluding that he right choice is one that hasn’t been published in a translation yet.

The full post, including Bloom’s suggested translation, can be found here.

Kimberly Moffitt, American Studies, on the Marc Steiner Show

On Monday, May 21, Kimberly Moffitt, assistant professor of American Studies, was a guest on the Marc Steiner show to respond to comments by Maryland State Delegate Pat McDonough on “mobs of roving black youth” in downtown Baltimore.  McDonough was also a guest on the show.

“My attitude is that either Baltimore is going to overcome crime, or crime is going to overcome Baltimore,” said McDonough, arguing that his use of “black” in the context was referring to the specific individuals engaged in the crime and not Baltimore’s African American population as a whole.

“We could have easily said there’s concern about youth mobs, or concerns about young people in the Inner Harbor, but that’s not what we heard.  What we heard is a very specific group of people, and by doing that we target that group of people to suggest that they are the only problem,” Moffitt responded.

“When we characterize black youth mobs, the reality is that it ends up not indicting not particular individuals but indicting an entire race of people,” she said. “There’s a goal that we all have to want to reduce crime… but what I hear when I hear some of the solutions [suggested by McDonough] is more about surveillance of black bodies and controlling them and containing them because they are seen in our society as villains, as criminals… I don’t hear that these are young people who might be misguided and need some other outlets.”

The full segment can be heard here.