A conversation with Religious Studies faculty members and undergraduate students.

REL faculty members: Dr. Amy DeRogatis, Dr. Mohammad Khalil, Dr. David Stowe, and Dr. Morgan Shipley

Friday, October 4th, 12:00pm, A306 Wells Hall

Did you know anxiety is now widely reported to be the number one challenge for college students? Little wonder, with all the stressors today! In one recent study, 97% of students reported technological distractions in and beyond the classroom. In this series of three one-hour workshops, you’ll learn and start to use practical techniques for mastering anxiety and distraction.

Secular Meditation Workshops: Being Present

Thursday November, 14th, 2019 7 p.m
300 Human Ecology Building, 1st Floor Seminar Room

Speaker: Dr. Felix Kronenburg

The basic blueprint of the physical classroom has not
changed all that much in over a century, even as new
teaching methods and approaches, new technologies,
and new interdisciplinary insights into better ways to
support learning have greatly advanced during that same
timeframe. Do we still need physical learning spaces in
this age of ubiquitous computing? If we do, how can we
design and build them so that they will be able to adapt
to new educational transformations? Dr. Kronenberg
will give insights into and solutions from the new
interdisciplinary field of learning space design.

Speaker: Christina Boyles – Assistant Professor of Culturally-engaged Digital Humanities

Meditation and Consciousness: Secular Techniques for Mastering Anxiety and Distraction

Nature: Thursday, February 27th, 7:00pm
MSU Union, Lake Michigan Room

Nikita Gale | March 17 | Virtual on Zoom | 4 PM EST

This event does not require pre-registration, if you are interested in joining our zoom webinar, please do so using the link and password below.

https://msu.zoom.us/j/97803340342 pw: mutants

Nikita Gale (b. 1983, Anchorage, Alaska; lives and works in Los Angeles) is an artist living and working in Los Angeles, California and holds a BA in Anthropology with an emphasis in Archaeological Studies from Yale University and earned an MFA in New Genres at UCLA. Gale’s practice is often structured by long-term obsessions with specific objects and the ways these objects gesture towards particular social and political histories. Gale uses ubiquitous consumer technologies as frameworks to consider how individuals potentially reproduce their relationships to objects within their relationships to psychic space and political, social, and economic systems. For Gale, the term “reproduction” is as much a mechanical, technical process as it is a process rooted in sex, biology, and the organic.

On a more physical register, Gale’s work points to the ways that many technologies can be understood as instruments that extend or amplify the body through a relationship to touch. Reproduction connects humans to a desire for extension and amplification both biologically and through industrial processes. By engaging with materials that have properties that are simultaneously acoustic and protective, Gale’s recent work considers the role of the audience as a social arena and examines the ways in which silence and noise function as political positions and conditions.

Nikita’s work has recently been exhibited at MoMA PS1 (New York); LACE (Los Angeles); Commonwealth and Council (Los Angeles); Matthew Marks Gallery (Los Angeles); The Studio Museum in Harlem (New York); Rodeo Gallery (London); Ceysson & Benetiere (Paris); and in “Made in L.A. 2018” at the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles). Gale’s work has appeared in numerous publications including The New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, Art21, AQNB, Frieze, Vogue, and Flash Art. Nikita currently serves on the Board of Directors for GREX, the west coast affiliate of the AK Rice Institute for the Study of Social Systems.

For more information about Nikita Gale and their work, please visit their website.

Amanda Ross-Ho | March 24 | Virtual on Zoom | 4 PM EST

This event does not require pre-registration, if you are interested in joining our zoom webinar, please do so using the link and password below.

https://msu.zoom.us/j/97803340342 pw: mutants

Amanda Ross-Ho’s work draws from a broad hierarchy of structures, mapping connectivity within the overlapping ecologies of personal and universal phenomena. Her evolving personal language combines forensic and theatrical gestures, diagramming the reflexive relationships between production, presentation, and the social contracts of viewership. Her sculpture, painting, photography, installation, and most recently, public works have been exhibited widely, nationally, and internationally.

Amanda Ross-Ho holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from the Roski School of Art, University of Southern California.  Solo exhibitions include Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles, Hoet Bekaert, Belgium, The Pomona Museum of Art, Mitchell-Innes and Nash New York, The Visual Arts Center, Austin, TX, Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago, The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, Vleeshal Center for Contemporary Art, Middelburg, Netherlands, the Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn, Germany, The Approach, London, and Praz-Delavallade, Paris. Group exhibitions include Artists Space, New York, The Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, The Orange County Museum of Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, The New Museum, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the 2008 Whitney Biennial. In 2013 she debuted her first large-scale commissioned public work at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and in 2015, she presented a new large-scale sculpture commission in City Hall Park, New York City through the Public Art Fund. Ross-Ho’s work has been featured in Artforum, The New York Times, ArtReview, Modern Painters, Art in America, Flash Art, Art + Auction, and Frieze among others. She lives and works in Los Angeles.

For more information about Amanda Ross-Ho and their work, please visit their website.