Bridging Rochester’s Past & Present
April 28, 2021, 12:00-1:30 pm (EDT)
How can our past inform the present to help us build a better future? Our region has an incredibly rich history steeped in a sense of community and mutual obligation and has played an important role in a range of activist movements promoting justice and human rights. At a time of great divisiveness, we have a moral duty to reflect on the past in this context and look for lessons that will guide us into the future. Investigating the relationship between photography, politics, and history can help us internalize those lessons and use them to create space for dialogue on building a better and more inclusive community.
This virtual, interactive forum will focus on the crossroads of politics, history, and photography in Rochester (and beyond) while exploring the ways in which the photographic image has helped shape our understanding of the region’s historical figures and events.
Melina Carnicelli spent much of her professional career as a public school teacher and administrator, retiring in 2008. While on a mid-career hiatus from the field of education, Melina followed her entrepreneurial dream and co-founded Treble Associates, a workplace consulting firm specializing in valuing diversity and Creating Respectful Workplace Environments©, and where she created the Room Full of Sisters event, an annual gathering for women and girls to celebrate all of who they are. The former mayor of Auburn, NY Melina was the first and only woman thus far to be nominated for and elected to that position During her tenure, Melina became the first recipient of a local Martin Luther King, Jr. Drum Major Award for founding the Mayor’s Social Justice Task Force. In December 2016, along with 15 other women’s rights activists, Melina led the grassroots development and implementation of Women March in Seneca Falls; and in 2018, she founded 1st Amendment-1st Vote, Inc, the non-partisan civic engagement program for teens who identify as girls, to begin to imagine themselves in elected office and professional government-related positions.
Amanda Chestnut is a curator, multi-media artist, educator, and local arts loud-mouth in Rochester, New York. She is an image-based artist and has made art as a photographer for 25 years. Her artwork has been exhibited throughout New York State. Chestnut holds an MFA in Visual Studies from Visual Studies Workshop through The College at Brockport, SUNY. During her time at Brockport, she held graduate assistantships at Visual Studies Workshop and in the Criminal Justice Department. Recent lectures, radio appearances, and presentations focused on community action, equity in user experiences in digital platforms, curatorial practices, arts funding, new English words in 2020, and the over-policing of Blackness in the United States.
Meredith Davenport earned her MFA from Hunter College and her BFA from Rochester Institute of Technology. Her documentary projects have appeared in National Geographic, The New York Times, and on the cover of Newsweek magazine. She was a location producer and videographer in Colombia for the highly acclaimed HBO documentary “Child Soldiers.” She was invited to do a fellowship at Yaddo. She has received a Pew Fellowship and a Puffin Foundation grant. Her work has been exhibited in New York at the International Center of Photography and at Union Docs in Brooklyn. She is the recipient of a fellowship from the Everson Museum in Syracuse and New York Foundations of the Arts Mark award. Her book “Theater of War” is published by Intellect Press and is distributed by the University of Chicago Press. She is an Associate Professor of Photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
Bridging the Divide
Creating Meaningful Scholarship at the Teaching-Intensive Institution
April 29, 2021, 3:30-5:00 pm (EST)
View the full recording of this event.
Can community college humanities faculty engage in meaningful scholarship amid the workload demands of the teaching-intensive institution? How do they retain or reclaim their scholarly identities at schools that prioritize pedagogy and service over research and publishing? By what means might they expand or reimagine the notion and practice of “legitimate” scholarship within the context of their colleges’ teaching-intensive, access-oriented mission.
During this live, interactive forum–presented by the Community College Humanities Association and co-sponsored by MCC’s Institute for the Humanities–a panel of accomplished community college faculty members will discuss their respective approaches to both traditional and innovative forms of scholarly production—particularly their integration with pedagogy and curricular development—and examine the challenges and rewards inherent to the work of a humanities teacher-scholar.
Featured Speakers:
Kathleen Tamayo Alves, Associate Professor, English, CUNY Queensborough Community College
Jessica Floyd, Associate Professor, English, Community College of Baltimore County
Angelique Johnston, Professor, English, Monroe Community College
Andrew Winters, Associate Professor, Philosophy, Yavapai College
Michael Jacobs, Dean, Humanities and Social Sciences, Monroe Community College (Moderator)
