"Dublin Core:Title","Dublin Core:Subject","Dublin Core:Description","Dublin Core:Creator","Dublin Core:Source","Dublin Core:Publisher","Dublin Core:Date","Dublin Core:Contributor","Dublin Core:Rights","Dublin Core:Relation","Dublin Core:Format","Dublin Core:Language","Dublin Core:Type","Dublin Core:Identifier","Dublin Core:Coverage","Item Type Metadata:Text","Item Type Metadata:Interviewer","Item Type Metadata:Interviewee","Item Type Metadata:Location","Item Type Metadata:Transcription","Item Type Metadata:Local URL","Item Type Metadata:Original Format","Item Type Metadata:Physical Dimensions","Item Type Metadata:Duration","Item Type Metadata:Compression","Item Type Metadata:Producer","Item Type Metadata:Director","Item Type Metadata:Bit Rate/Frequency","Item Type Metadata:Time Summary","Item Type Metadata:Email Body","Item Type Metadata:Subject Line","Item Type Metadata:From","Item Type Metadata:To","Item Type Metadata:CC","Item Type Metadata:BCC","Item Type Metadata:Number of Attachments","Item Type Metadata:Standards","Item Type Metadata:Objectives","Item Type Metadata:Materials","Item Type Metadata:Lesson Plan Text","Item Type Metadata:URL","Item Type Metadata:Event Type","Item Type Metadata:Participants","Item Type Metadata:Birth Date","Item Type Metadata:Birthplace","Item Type Metadata:Death Date","Item Type Metadata:Occupation","Item Type Metadata:Biographical Text","Item Type Metadata:Bibliography","Item Type Metadata:Player","Item Type Metadata:Imported Thumbnail","Item Type Metadata:Referrer",tags,file,itemType,collection,public,featured "A Mountain of Faith",,"It was the middle of nowhere—nothing but sand, the occasional old car or rusted out piece of machinery, a strange lake known as the Salton Sea, and in the distance a rising mound of color that glimmered in the desert sun. In 2010, with encouragement from my religion professor, my mother and I quite literally drove across the country, roughly 2600 miles to Salvation Mountain, a mound of colorful paint that displayed biblical and religious messages. Bible verses accompanied images of bluebirds, flowers and waterfalls, all molded out of a mixture of clay and straw. This visit proved well worth the journey as it helped me to jump into ethnographic fieldwork while also allowing me to experience my first prominent ‘humanities moment.’ Rising 50 feet high and spanning 150 feet wide, the Dr. Seuss-like whimsical creation was made entirely by hand and proved to be as unique as its creator, Leonard Knight, an elderly man who dedicated his life to building this mountain in an effort to proclaim God’s love. Leonard was as kind hearted and gentle spirited as I had imagined. He lived at the mountain staying primarily in an old shaded hammock. A couple people who would check on Leonard over the years explained that he spent his days scavenging the dump for old building materials that he could use to add to his mountain. Along the way, he would often pick up something to eat. Salvaging car doors, windows, ladders, and buckets, Leonard incorporated anything he could find into his masterpiece. Over time, he built it up—adding new sections like a makeshift trophy room that contained local plaques he received or the ‘yellow brick road’ that consisted of a painted yellow stairway to the top. Showing us around, Leonard emphasized the reason for building the mountain: he wanted to tell the whole world that God is Love. He explained, “people got too complicated with love. Just keep it simple.” While his mountain displayed bible verses like the Lord’s Prayer and proclamations like “Jesus loves you,” perhaps above all Salvation Mountain acted as a direct representation of one man’s personal faith and larger understanding of the world around him. The mountain embodied a lived religion that ventured beyond static scriptures into the dry heat and sun-worn desert landscape of California. As an undergraduate, I understood religion within a sociological lens. It could help organize groups, driving and inspiring a range of outlooks and perspectives. But it was also magical, evoking a sense of wonder and awe. Like other humanities, religion helps us to explore and think critically about the human experience while deeply tugging at our emotions. Talking with Leonard a man who lived off the grid in a hammock in the desert, he whole-heartedly believed in the power of love and set out to embody such a love through the best way he could: a large colorful mountain. Of the handful of visitors I met that day, Leonard was the only person who had any strong ties to religion. Though his proclamation seemed apart from the views of those who stumbled upon the creation and an anomaly in a seemingly ‘middle of nowhere’ location, Salvation Mountain reveals the rich life and prevalence of religious thought that exists in marginalized places. While faith is normally looked at in the grandeur of cathedrals, churches, mosques, and temples, or even the beauty and solace of redwood forests, canyon lands, and ocean horizons, Salvation Mountain’s appearance on the margins of town and society show that even in the most unlikely of places, religion can drive conversation, thought, and action. It reveals the complexity and power that religion can have, even when its just one person calling out in the desolate desert. ",,,,2010,"Victoria Machado, 30, PhD Candidate in Religion & Nature / Writing Instructor at the University of Florida ",,,,,,mountain-of-faith,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"National Humanities Center Summer 2020 Graduate Student Residency ","Architecture,Art,Bible,Cultural Awareness,Faith,Religion,Religious Studies,Sociology",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/17/402/intro.jpg,Text,"Graduate Student Residents 2020",1,0 "The Beginning of Something Brilliant",,"The Glasscock Summer Scholars programs is a project that falls in the realm of the humanities. Specifically, my project deals with social psychology. So in the summer, after attending a two week seminar on marginalized groups and individuals, it was time to decide what my topic would be on. On that day, I met Gabe Miller, a sociology grad student, who signed up to help me along with my advisor, Dr. Adrienne Carter-Sowell. So we brainstormed a bunch of ideas and started narrowing down topics. We settled on seeing if social media sites can be used as a coping mechanism for African Americans who are racially discriminated against in order to protect their mental health. The process of coming to this topic was great! It was the first time that I really put what I had learned in that two week seminar to practical use which was exciting since social psychology is not my area of expertise. In that moment I knew that we had found something special. Several months later, we are now nearing the end of this thesis journey and it all started with that brainstorming session.",,"The source comes from an honorary thesis that I have been working on through the Glasscock Summer Scholars program at Texas A&M. This program gives students the opportunity to create an honorary thesis and gain research experience as undergrads.",,"Summer 2019"," Lincoln El-Amin, English major at Texas A&M University",,,,,,beginning-something-brilliant,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"I heard about Humanities Moments through the Glasscock Summer Scholars program, a program offered to students at Texas A&M. ","African American Studies,Psychology,Social Media,Sociology",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/360/merakist-CNbRsQj8mHQ-unsplash.jpg,Text,,1,0 "Damaged Goods? Learning about (Mis)information about Sexuality in the Clinic",,"
My humanities moment connects to a book, titled Damaged Goods: Women Living With Incurable Sexually Transmitted Diseases written by Adina Nack, a sociologist and women’s and gender studies (WGS) scholar writing about health, sexuality, and society. This book is about women’s experiences living with HPV. I read this book in my undergrad in a WGS course about medicine, right around the time I was starting to learn more about WGS and before I decided to double major in this discipline. In particular, one of the book’s themes focuses on provider-patient interactions and the misinformation that spreads surrounding women’s sexuality and who can be affected by HPV, which really stood out to me at the time. Women reported being told inaccurate information about their risk of contracting the disease based on their sexuality.
Flash forward to the end of my first year of graduate school, where I was at the gynecologist for an annual pap smear. In the back of my head, I was always curious about the themes from this book and about how providers might share inaccurate information with their patients. Unfortunately, as it turns out, I was not disappointed. I don’t remember how the conversation started per se, but I know that I initiated a line of questioning about STIs and the risks of contracting HPV as a queer woman and that my gynecologist did not. In response to my inquiries, my gynecologist responded saying that women who have sex with women are not as at risk as others, saying something along of the lines of “it doesn’t go in as far” — whatever that means.
This moment was important to me for two reasons: 1) in the moment, I remembered from Nack’s book that this type of (mis)information contributed to women’s misunderstandings of their risk of getting HPV and subsequently their contraction of this STI; and 2) later, I would reflect on and unpack whatever “it doesn’t go in as far” means and the types of ideologies about gender and sexuality circulating there. This provider held a lot of assumptions about gender and sexuality that informed this response: assumptions about the types of sex people are having; about how sexual identity and behavior relate to one another; and about binary sex/gender. These assumptions contributed to inferior care and did not take into account people’s lived experiences of their gender and sexuality.
Nack highlighted women’s perspectives on their health and sexual selves in her book to capture a more complex understanding of women’s sexuality. As demonstrated by my provider, the complexity of people’s lived experiences of their gender and sexuality are incompatible at times with a biomedical framework or understanding of gender and sexuality, and misinformation about health, sexuality, and gender can flourish in this space. These types of themes of this incompatibility between biomedical and WGS informed understandings of sexuality and gender and the stakes for patients have turned into questions that guide my research. With my research, I am interested in how gender and sexuality get transformed in the clinical encounter and how doctors teach and learn about gender and sexuality. Within the classroom, how is a patient’s gender/sexuality, and the complexity inherent in these lived experiences, understood? Physicians, in some ways, elided the sexualities and gender identities of women in Nack’s book, and my own. To me WGS perspectives on gender and sexuality make room for possibilities to transcend gender and sexuality binaries. These understandings of gender and sexuality from the two sources — biomedical and WGS — do not necessarily map onto one another, and I want to know why and how WGS perspectives can impact medical education to be able to provide care for LGBTQ identities in a nuanced way.
",,"Adina Nack, Women Living With Incurable Sexually Transmitted Diseases",,,"Jessica Herling, 27, Sociology and Women's and Gender Studies graduate student",,,,,,damaged-goods,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"Grad Student Summer Residents 2019","Doctors & Medicine,LGBTQ Rights,Sociology,Women's and Gender Studies,Women's Health",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/15/319/LGBTQ_medical_image.jpg,Text,"Graduate Student Summer Residents 2019",1,0 "Chronicling a Summer in Cinéma Vérité",,"For Peter Galison, an influential moment was seeing a film made in 1961 by an anthropologist and a sociologist, featuring a series of estival interviews with people on the sidewalks of France. With its innovations in sound technology, Chronicle of a Summer opened Galison’s eyes to the possibilities of documentary film. The film illuminated the interplay between image and text, revealing how the humanities can “open up a world.”",,"Chronicle of a Summer (Chronique d'un été)",,,"Peter Galison, Joseph Pellegrino University Professor in History of Science and Physics at Harvard University",,,,,,peter-galison-chronicling-a-summer-in-cinema-verite,,,,,,"Hi, I’m Peter Galison, I’m a professor at Harvard University and a Fellow at the National Humanities Center this semester. I’m interested in a combination—odd as it sounds—of filmmaking, physics, and the history of science.A moment that really was hugely affecting for me in the humanities was seeing an old film, that was filmed in the summer of 1960, called Chronicle of a Summer. It was a French film made by a collaboration between a sociologist/philosopher, Edgar Morin, and a great filmmaker, might be called an anthropological filmmaker, Jean Rouch.
They combined to make this film in a moment just when it was possible to have portable sound-taking. They went onto the street and they asked people everything from, “Are you happy?” or “What are you doing?” In the course of what people say, you see a France that goes back even before the war, of horse-drawn carriages, but also cars. You meet a woman who had survived Auschwitz-Birkenau, lost her father there, and was now trying to navigate this post-war world. But 1960 is also the cusp of this opening up to another world of France. In a sense you see the beginnings of the unrest, the uneasiness with the received order of things, that culminates in May ’68 and the explosion of the student and worker revolt of that period.
For me, this film had a huge effect because it seemed to me to capture, in a moment in specificity, some really deep understanding of this transition point between the old order and the new order. It showed me that film could do something, a documentary film of a certain type—a certain exploratory, innovative type—could push beyond what text alone could do. I think, for me, the idea which I keep trying to figure out, is how do visual sources—especially the filmmaking that I’m doing and writing—combine to produce something whole that each part can’t quite do on its own.
With each bit of understanding, as people push what can be done with text, or text plus still images, or with film in innovative ways, I find it enriching and exciting and it opens up new possibilities for how I think about the kinds of problems that I want to work on. For me, the humanities at its best can do that, can take something specific and open up a world from it.
",,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"",,,"Anthropology,Chronicle of a Summer (Chronique d'un été),Cinema Vérité,Cultural History,Documentary Films,Film,History,Morin, Edgar,Professors,Rouch, Jean,Sociology",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/8/182/paris-2971589_340.jpg,Sound,"National Humanities Center Fellows",1,0