Celebration of IUN Faculty Research

 “[Participatory Art is]…an artistic orientation towards the social…to overturn the traditional relationship between the art object, and artist and the audience. To put it simply: the artist is conceived less as an individual producer of discrete objects than as a collaborator and producer of situations.” Claire Bishop, “Artificial Hells”

The second annual celebration of IUN Faculty Research, where a dozen professors summarize their current projects in eight minutes each, took place via zoom. I was particularly interested in ethicist Anya Matwijkiw’s talk on Danish efforts to criminalize the wearing of Islamic headscarves (I have mixed feelings on the subject, believing bourkhas are a way men subjugate wives) and historian David Parnell’s take on “Why Ancient Authors Conducted Smear Campaigns against Powerful Women.” The 90-minute program also gave me a chance to hear about innovative projects by faculty whom I had not met before, such as Yllka Azema in Marketing, Psychologist Maureen Rutherford, who spoke on anxiety disorders, and Chidiebele Constance Obichi in Nursing, who asserted that up to 400,000 preventable medical errors occur annually in the U.S., usually due to the lack of a collaborative health care system.

In his welcome remarks Chancellor Ken Iwama noted that a year ago he was at another institution but was so impressed with IUN’s first annual celebration of faculty research that he looked forward to coming to our university. Vice Chancellor Vicki Roman-Lagunas referenced how the entire campus community came together in 2017 on the first day of Fall semester to observe through “funny glasses” the solar eclipse (I recall how awesome it was as the sky darkened) and she looked forward to this coming fall when hopefully the campus would be back to a semblance of normality.

Fine Arts professor Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford gave a fascinating presentation on “Floating Museums,” that are meant to bring art and cultural artifacts to the people by taking place in common spaces. One such “pop-up pavilion” in Chicago honored Haitian-born French fur trader Jean Baptiste Point du Sable and his Potawatomi wife Kitihawa, the first residents not only of the “Windy City” but also of Gary, with an inflatable sculpture, something Hulsebos-Spofford specializes in. Another piece recreated the scene at Chicago’s Logan Square during the 1968 Democratic National Convention protests when someone (rumored to be an undercover agent) planted a Viet Cong flag atop the statue.

Focusing on the sixth-century Byzantine historian Procopius of Caesarea, whose “Secret History” dealt primarily with the military campaigns of Roman general Balacarius during the reign of Emperor Justinian, David Parnell noted that the objects of the writer’s sexual smear campaigns were two strong women indispensable to their husbands but resented by embittered men, Empress Theodora and Antonina, the wife of Balacarius. Proccopius claimed that Theodora was enslaved by lust and seduced up to ten men a night, while Antonia controlled Balacarius by sex and black magic and had incestual carnal relations with her own son. Parnell drew parallels between Roman and contemporary times, using salacious and slanderous rumors about Hillary Clinton and other strong women as examples, a trend that has become more pronounced during our age of social media.