Hobart and William Smith Colleges

Each Friday during the Fall and Spring academic semesters, a faculty volunteer gives a 30 minute lunchtime talk on her/his scholarship and/or teaching practices. Faculty members are invited to learn a little more about their colleagues, chat with others that attend the presentations, and enjoy a wonderful buffet lunch. Talks start at 12:30 p.m. and are usually over a little past 1 p.m.

The event is sponsored by the Office of Academic and Faculty Affairs.

Spring 2023 Schedule

Jan 27     Patricia Mowery (Biology) and Justin Miller (Chemistry/ Health Professions)

Public Health Program Proposal

As part of an HWS curriculum grant, Jessica Hayes-Conroy, Justin Miller, and Patricia Mowery have been developing a Public Health major and minor, which would replace the current Health Care Professions minor. We will share the goals, vision, and status of the program, and solicit feedback from you on the program.

FEB 3    Hanqing Hu (Mathematics and Computer Science)

A call for collaboration: what Natural Language Processing can help in revealing the secrets behind Black Lives Matter tweets

A 5-year span of tweets were collected using the keyword "Black Live Matter" or "BLM." Natural Language Processing technology can reveal surprises and patterns hidden behind millions of words. What is the significance of these secrets and patterns for society, politics and humanity? That's where I need your help.

FEB 10  Chris Annear (Anthropology) and Emma Falkenstein ’21 (MRB Group)

Building Foundations: Faculty-Student Research

We will talk about existing HWS frameworks for developing publishable student-faculty research by discussing the process of researching a trio of recent and future publications. We will focus on one of these articles, “Building in Stories: How Narratives Drive Development in a Small City in Central New York State (Human Organization, 2022, 81(4): 358-367, https://doi.org/10.17730/1938-3525-81.4.35), which explores the creation of two distinct but related developmental processes in Geneva: the Downtown Revitalization Initiative (DRI) and Police Review Board (PRB) to understand the sociopolitical and applied processes by which different core narratives shape development initiatives and outcomes. These two examples demonstrate how stories about a community’s past, present, and future compete with each other to empower some community-based conceptions of development to coalesce, while blocking others. We find that both processes act as place-makers—one via infrastructural construction and the other through the establishment of a law. In focusing on the power of narratives, these examples show how stories drive contested interests and shape constructed resources through access to political, social, and cultural power. This work emerged from Emma’s project in a class, which she then developed through her Honors project—ultimately leading to summer research, publication, and continued research collaboration. From this experience, we argue that integrating student scholarship with pedagogy enhances the student experience and the draw of an HWS education.

FEB 17   TBA