On behalf of the Concordia University’s Part-time Faculty Association (CUPFA), the first Microtalks event of three to come this school year, which consists of six-minute talks presented by part-time faculty, will be launched and open to students on campus Tuesday Oct. 22.
Taking place in the EV building on the sixth floor in the department of Design and Computation Arts, MicroTalks will explore and educate, with visual and verbal material, various topics of interest sought out and researched by part-time faculty members.
“The primary goal of the MicroTalks is to promote and share part-time faculty research with other part-time faculty members, full-time faculty and students, in order to create an engaged discussion around [what] part-time faculty are up to outside of the classroom,” said CUPFA Vice President Lorraine Oades.
“Too often students, faculty and the administration forget that part-time faculty are engaging in cutting edge research and we wanted to highlight the diversity and achievements of our members.”
Oades, who has been preparing the MicroTalks project for the past year, is excited for it to begin next week.
“I began officially organizing the MicroTalks series this summer with Donna Nebenzahl, from journalism, and Alison Loader, from computation arts and design, who are co-ordinating the MicroTalks with me,” she said. “We started meeting in early June and met regularly throughout the summer.”
Each MicroTalk event will have a specific theme around which all participating part-time faculty will focus their six-minute talks. The theme for the first event is control and identity.
This theme, as written in the MicroTalks press release, will address the “often invisible forces of power we face every day as twenty-first century global citizens living in a rapidly shifting and often uncertain terrain. The presenters explore various mechanisms of control, how they shape us as individuals and at times circumscribe our future.”
During the event’s two hour timespan, students will hear and learn from a variety of part-time faculty members focusing on and interpreting diverse areas of expertise such as sociology, painting and drawing, religion, urban planning, business technology management, design and computation arts, intermedia/cyberarts and more.
This week’s event will feature 10 different part-time faculty members. The reasoning behind the specified six-minute talks derives from the presentation style called PechaKucha in which 20 slides are shown for 20 seconds each — a format that keeps presentations concise, fast-paced and powers multiple-speaker events.
“We wanted to create a series of high-energy interdisciplinary evenings, each of which would focus on a specific theme,” said Oades. “There will be a question and answer period at the end of all the presentations, which we hope will develop into a real dialogue between the audience and the individual presenters.”
The MicroTalks project will also allow students the opportunity to find out more about their instructors and introduce themselves to areas or disciplines they aren’t already familiar with.
The second MicroTalks event will take place Jan. 21, focusing on a theme of light and landscape, and the third on Feb. 25, with a theme of community and culture.
The first MicroTalks event will take place Oct. 22 from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. in EV 6.720, 1515 St. Catherine St. West.
