Rincker Receives Grant to Study Women’s Organizations in Pakistan

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. — The American Political Science Association has awarded Illinois Wesleyan University’s Meg Rincker a $3,500 grant to continue her research on women’s organizations in developing democracies. Rincker, a visiting assistant professor of political science at IWU, will use the funds to conduct surveys in Pakistan.

“In new and emerging democracies, political decisions are often made by local governments,” said Rincker, who has also conducted a similar survey in Poland. “The goal of the surveys is to discover if these local governments are more accessible to women’s groups than the national government.”

Rincker, who has been with IWU since 2005, will carry out the surveys through connections with two scholars at the University of Punjab in Lahore, Pakistan. “Scholars there will assist in carrying out the surveys in Pakistan’s four provincial capitals and the national capital of Islamabad,” said Rincker.

The surveys will assess the priorities of women’s groups across Pakistan, and whether recently empowered provincial governments are responding effectively, said Rincker. “We want to know what issues are most important to women,” she said, noting the surveys will ask about healthcare, female literacy and the practice of “honour killings,” where women are killed, often by male relatives, for bringing shame upon their families through perceived sexual immodesty.

Senior Builds Filmmaking Repertoire

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – Sehaj Sethi expects a bright future working on film sets after graduating from Illinois Wesleyan University.

The senior English-writing major from Inverness, Ill., who is co-head of IWU’s filmmaking organization, 9×9, has already helped to coordinate a film festival for Cinema/Chicago, a not-for-profit multicultural and educational organization, and worked on several projects for 9×9. A producer in her own right, Sethi has also made three independent films.

“In my films, I always like pushing the boundaries and doing things no one else has done because the moment you take people out of their comfort zones, you have their attention,” said Sethi.

For example, in the opening scene of Sethi’s third independent film, Piccavi, which means “I have sinned” in Latin, “a terrible act is combined with beautiful imagery and sound,” said Sethi.

With one line of dialogue, “He weighed 155 pounds,” Sethi presents the viewer with the first subtle clue that something is amiss, using this single phrase to manipulate the viewer’s perception of the lead character’s seemingly innocuous actions.

Both Piccavi and Sethi’s first independent film, Baby Boy America, were chosen as official selections for Cinema/Chicago’s 2007 Future Filmmakers Festival, which accepts film submissions from filmmakers 20 years of age or younger.

Undaunted by sensitive subjects, Sethi based Baby Boy America on a poem by Patricia Smith titled “Skinheads.” The seven-minute film is composed of images relating to this poem.

“When Baby Boy America was showing at the festival, I was shaking and hyperventilating because I didn’t know what the audience would think,” said Sethi.

Sethi’s anxiety about the film’s reception was relieved when two viewers gave a standing ovation while they applauded.

“It hit me like a boulder to my chest. I was stunned that I had impacted some audience members that way,” said Sethi, adding that the moment, which has remained a pinnacle in her life as a budding filmmaker, marked her decision to use cinema as her medium to continue influencing others.

Sethi’s fascination with film began when she was seven during her first trip to the movie theater, to see Jurassic Park with her uncle and cousin. “They were terrified of the film and I was head-over-heels in love with this magic movie world that came to life for me.”

She attributes one of her teachers at William Fremd High School who “was as crazy about film as I was” with sparking her interest in the filmmaking process during her senior year. “Until I took his film appreciation class, I didn’t realize what effect editing, sound editing, camera angles, or lighting had. After that, I was starving for information,” said Sethi.

Upon arriving at IWU, Sethi began working with 9×9 and its founder, Mike Gabriele, class of 2007. Along with Gabriele, Sethi researched and compiled filmmaking equipment for the group.

Dunlop Named Student Laureate by Lincoln Academy of Illinois

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – Marcus Dunlop, a senior business administration and economics double major from Maywood, Ill. and graduate of Proviso East High School, has been named a Lincoln Academy of Illinois Student Laureate.

The Lincoln Academy of Illinois, founded in 1965, honors distinguished citizens of Illinois for their contributions to society. For each of the past 33 years, the academy has recognized one accomplished student from each four-year degree-granting institution of higher learning in Illinois.

Every year each institution’s president nominates an outstanding senior who has demonstrated exceptional academic and extracurricular achievement. The award recipients receive a medallion, a check for $150 and a certificate.

Dunlop has been a member of the national honor society Phi Kappa Phi since his junior year. He has also presided over the Risk Management and Finance Society as president for the past two years. A running back for the Illinois Wesleyan varsity football team, Dunlop has been a four-year starter and was twice named an all-conference player.

Professor Explores African Expressive Arts

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – Men dance in celebration, wooden ships race across the water and hands beat handcrafted drums. It is a celebration on the East African island of Lamu, and for Illinois Wesleyan University Associate Professor of Anthropology Rebecca Gearhart, it is an opportunity to learn.

“The expressive arts that I study are challenging to describe in words, which is why I use visual media,” said Gearhart, who has been exploring traditions off the coast of Kenya. “These traditions include the dance competitions performed during festivals and rituals, wood carving, handmade ship building – all visually spectacular Swahili expressive art forms.”

Although anthropologists often use photographs and video to illustrate their ethnographic research, Gearhart explains that it is rare for anthropologists to have been trained to use visual media as a methodology in a “visual anthropology” course. “There are very few of us who teach visual anthropology, which is why it is so unique for our anthropology program at IWU to be able to offer it to our students,” said Gearhart. “The issues that visual anthropology raises allow us to teach the visual methods course as a course on anthropological ethics.”

An instructor at Illinois Wesleyan since 1999, Gearhart explains to her students that taking a photo as a visual anthropologist is more than illustrating what you write about the society under study, it is part of a methodology used to gather information in a collaborative way. And taking images of people must always be done with the ethical implications in mind. “When an image of a person is taken, that person is often viewed as representing an entire culture and rarely if ever has any input on how the image is interpreted or used,” said Gearhart. “The best visual anthropology is collaborative in nature and allows members of the society under study to participate in their own representation.”

According to Gearhart, taking photographs of people is a great way to build rapport. “Giving people copies of the photos you take of them is an important way to earn their trust, especially since most visitors promise to send photos but never do.” In addition, Gearhart uses photographs in the interview process. “You need to talk with the people in the photos, so they can explain what’s going on in the image,” said Gearhart. “It sounds simple, but those conversations provide detailed information that leads to a greater understanding of the culture.”

IWU Librarian Honored for Contributions to Downtown

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – Illinois Wesleyan’s University Librarian Karen Schmidt was awarded the Jean Anderson Downtown Improvement Award by the Downtown Bloomington Association and the City of Bloomington in recognition of her contributions to the downtown.

In presenting the award on Nov. 5, Bloomington Mayor Steve Stockton cited Schmidt’s work “to build a stronger, vibrant downtown and her tireless efforts to connect people and resources to secure a bright future for a vital city and city center.”

A member of the City Council, Schmidt represents the city’s Sixth Ward, which includes much of downtown. She joined Illinois Wesleyan in August 2007, following 25 years at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The Jean Anderson Downtown Improvement Award is named in honor of alderwoman Jean Anderson, who served on the Bloomington City Council from 1989 until her death in 1996. Her dedication and leadership set the stage for a downtown renaissance by pioneering the idea of public and private involvement in downtown Bloomington.

Schmidt is actively involved with many non-profit and community organizations, including the Old House Society and the Bloomington Center for Performing Arts. She is the 2002 winner of the YWCA Women of Distinction award.

“Downtown Bloomington would not be where it is today without the leadership of Karen Schmidt,” said Greg Koos, president of the Downtown Bloomington Association and executive director of the McLean County Museum of History. “Her commitment to the economic strength and viability of the downtown is immeasurable. We are thankful for her dedication and devotion to this area and to the entire city.”

Team to Discuss Groundbreaking China Research at Asian Studies Colloquium

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. — Three Illinois Wesleyan University students and a professor who traveled to China this summer will speak about the groundbreaking work of their team at the Asian Studies Colloquium Series on Tuesday, Nov. 13, from 12:10 p.m. to 1 p.m. in Room E 103 of the Center for Natural Sciences (201 Beecher Street). The event is part of International Education Week on campus, and the public is invited to attend.

The Series is an opportunity for faculty and students to share findings from their specialized research on Asia. The presenting research team, led by Thomas Lutze, associate professor and chair of history at Illinois Wesleyan, journeyed to the Chinese cities, Beijing, Shanghai, Peking and Hangzhou, to explore urban planning in post-Revolutionary China. It is an area that has been relatively untouched in the field of Chinese history, according to Lutze.

“This is a significant research topic in modern Chinese history that has been overlooked in Western literature, and not very widely researched in China,” said Lutze, whose team investigated how the Communist government of 1949 addressed the chaos of post-war China. “After eight years of World War II and three years of Civil War, the infrastructure of urban China had been pretty much destroyed. There were a lot of people who were in desperate need of housing, of health care, of schooling.”

In order to explore the issue, the team received an ASIANetwork Freeman Student Faculty Fellows Grant that allowed them to travel for nearly three and a half weeks in June and July to universities, archives and sites in the three cities. The five IWU students on the team were each assigned a topic to research: pollution, education, housing, sanitation and health care. “We were able to go into the stacks and look up articles, with the help of translators of course,” said Christy Ivie, a junior sociology major who studied efforts of the government to provide housing. “We walked through the housing built by the government. It was incredible to actually see what we were researching right in front of us.”

Ken Burns Talks About The War

BLOOMINGTON, Ill.— Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns never thought he would be associated with history. The Academy Award-winning producer and director, known for his beloved series on baseball, the Civil War and jazz, simply wanted to create films.

“If you would have asked me in high school if people would think of me as preserving history, I never would have believed them,” Burns said to a packed audience at the Hansen Student Center at Illinois Wesleyan University Thursday afternoon. Listen to his talk (mp3 file)

It is the people that interest Burns, and discovering their place in history. “You have to remember that at the base of the word history is the word story,” said Burns, whose appearance, on the heels of his latest series on World War II titled The War, came as part of the Adlai E. Stevenson Lecture Series, a joint effort by IWU and Illinois State University.

Making films since 1974, Burns rose to national attention with his multiple-part documentary The Civil War in 1990, watched by 40 million people on PBS, which introduced many to his famed panning of still photographs that has become known as “Burns effect.” “It’s always fun to have an effect named after you,” Burns said with a light laugh. Burns’ true calling card, however, is his combination of extensive research and emphasis on telling the story of people from all levels of society.

“We try to understand events from the bottom up. Instead of looking at just the generals, we look at everyone. You go on the belief that there are no ordinary people, and you will find you are right,” said Burns.

The Ames Library Secures Research Grants

BLOOMINGTON, Ill.— The Ames Library at Illinois Wesleyan University has been awarded two grants to further resources for digital collections.

Assessment Grant

A $3,000 Library Services and Technology Act grant from the state of Illinois will help develop an assessment tool to measure the effectiveness of digital collections.

Stephanie Davis-Kahl, digital and media initiatives librarian for The Ames Library, will use funds from the grant to research, create and implement surveys to help measure how much students use and learn from the Swahili Expressive Arts Collection, gathered by Rebecca Gearhart, IWU associate professor of anthropology. Davis-Kahl will then use the survey as a model to assess the value of other digital collections to IWU academic departments and patrons.

Sharing Resources

Eight libraries across the state, including Illinois Wesleyan, will use a grant from the Consortium of Academic & Research Libraries in Illinois to expand and share collections.

The libraries, which include The Ames Library, received a total of $27,500 to help build and maintain monographs, DVDs and other materials that speak about the needs of the planet, and human impact in the natural world. Individual libraries will concentrate on areas such as urban ecology, nanotechnology and molecular microbiology. The libraries will make the materials available to students and faculty across the state. The Ames Library will receive $3,000 to expand collections on neurobiology.

Senior Selected as Finalist for Chemistry Award

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – Jamie Rogers, a senior chemistry major from Elmwood, Ill., has been chosen as one of 11 finalists for the Frank and Sara McKnight Prize in Undergraduate Chemistry.

The prize, established by Dr. Steven McKnight, chairman of University of Texas Southwestern’s Department of Biochemistry, and awarded by the university, acknowledges undergraduate achievement in chemistry research.

In November, Rogers will attend the UT Southwestern Biochemistry Research Retreat in New Braunfels, Texas to present her research along with the other finalists in a poster session. The prize’s selection committee will judge the finalists on their presentation as well as the gravity of their research.

“Being a finalist for this highly competitive award is an honor in itself,” says Ram Mohan, professor of chemistry at IWU, who supervises Rogers’ research in his lab.

Rogers’ research explores replacing toxic chemical processes with more environmentally friendly ones, particularly by utilizing the element Bismuth. In her nominated research project, Rogers used bismuth-based catalysts to replace more toxic catalysts previously used to synthesize molecules of interest to the pharmaceutical industry.

New Illinois Wesleyan Poll Shows Obama Leading in Illinois

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. — Heading into next week’s debate among Democrat presidential candidates, a new statewide survey conducted by Illinois Wesleyan University showed Sen. Barack Obama as the clear – but not overwhelming – favorite among Illinois voters.

Choosing between Obama, Sen. Hillary Clinton and John Edwards, 36 percent of Illinois voters surveyed last week favor Obama, 26 percent favor Clinton and 16 percent choose Edwards.

The Republican side lacked a clear favorite, with voters closely divided between top choices Sen. John McCain (21 percent) and Rudy Giuiliani (23 percent).

The poll demonstrated unpopularity for President Bush, with 69 percent of voters disapproving of his performance. Illinois’ Democratic Governor Rod Blagojevich is also unpopular, with a 60 percent disapproval rating.

Illinois voters are strongly opposed to the Iraq War, with 59 percent saying it was a mistake to send troops to Iraq, and 52 percent believing the United States should withdraw troops as soon as possible, even if Iraq is not completely stable.

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