HFA Days: Centers & Initiatives Panel
March 26, 20206, 4:30-6:30 p.m. Bernie Dallas Room, 507 Goodell Hall
Schedule
4:45-4:55pm — Welcome and Introduction
Dean Davidson/ VCRE
4:55-5:10 Word Meaning and Large Language Models
Katrin Erk, Linguistics
Word meanings, simple as they feel in everyday use, pose surprisingly difficult research problems. For one thing, many words are flexible in their meanings. Take "leave the room in disarray" versus "leave the backpack in the kitchen": Why do we perceive "leave" to have different meanings here, what in its context compels it to take on one meaning rather than another? We explore these questions through Large Language Models: Their internal representations are basically compact reflections of all the texts they have read, and we can probe them as proxy representations of word meaning. But these representations are a jumble of different patterns. So part of the problem is to develop tools that distinguish the signal from the noise, and that will give us reliable answers about the puzzles of word meaning.
5:10-5:25pm — Civic Engagement and Service-Learning at UMass Amherst
Joseph Krupczynski, Architecture/CESL
The Office of Civic Engagement and Service‑Learning (CESL) is UMass Amherst's central hub for community‑engaged learning. CESL fosters learning experiences inside and outside the classroom that advance social justice and social change. Students and faculty in CESL programs partner with a diverse range of community organizations — from service providers to activist groups — to develop courses and curricula that integrate disciplinary content with community partners' perspectives and goals. By creating new models of collaboration across the university–community divide, CESL courses and programs strengthen all participants' ability to engage in democratic life in reflective, responsible, and transformative ways. This presentation will review CESL's goals, values, and programs, and will outline opportunities for students and faculty to engage in community‑based learning at UMass.
5:25-5:40pm — ART€FACTS
Malcolm Sen and Marjorie Rubright, English
The Earth stands deconstructed as a financialized globe and a technological orb in the Anthropocene. It is the "planet" to be "saved" according to climate action narratives. TAP emerges from an understanding that hegemonic sustainability sciences, green capitalism, and industry-led energy transition narratives often bypass the cultural glue that historical conceptions and indigenous, pre-modern epistemologies of the earth have made the planet a safe, habitable, and thrivable commons. It asks: how might we re-imagine the earth as the construction of cultural imaginaries instead? What political potentialities emerge when we deconstruct techno-futuristic visions of the earth and reimagine superintelligence as cultural wisdom: the earth as common wealth? To reconstruct lost world views requires humanistic interference in sustainability paradigms and humanistic engagement with the art(e)facts by which we come to know, understand, and inhabit the earth. The ART(e)FACTS Project charts a way forward.
5:40-5:55pm — Slavery North
Martha McNamara & Roxanne Cornellier
"Founded in 2022, Slavery North is a one-of-a-kind academic and cultural destination where scholars, thinkers, artists, and cultural producers build community and produce research and cultural outcomes that transform our understanding of the neglected histories of Transatlantic Slavery in Canada and the US North.
Slavery North seeks to advance social justice by recuperating and interrogating the complex histories of Transatlantic Slavery and European colonization of the Americas, thereby recovering the cultures, experiences, lives, and resistance of enslaved peoples in Canada and the US North. We do this by building a collaborative research community through fellowships, programs, events, publications, media work, and education.
At the heart of Slavery North is a fellowship program that welcomes national and international students, artists, and scholars, providing them with the space, funding, time, and community to produce transformative research outcomes.
5:55-6:10pm — Environmental Studies of the Holocaust: IHGMS Working Group
Hannah Polin-Galay, History/Judaic & Near East Studies/Institute for Holocaust, Genocide and Memory Studies
Pollin-Galay will give a brief summary of the activities of the Institute for Holocaust, Genocide and Memory Studies, while focusing mostly on the 2026-27 international working group, "Environmental Studies of the Holocaust: Between Maps and Words, Lives and Landscapes." The contemporary Climate Crisis has raised our awareness of the meaningful roles that nonhuman nature plays in events of mass atrocity, the Holocaust among them. Without falling into anachronisms, we can use today's heightened environmental awareness to uncover aspects of the Holocaust past that have remained underexamined until now. Those include: notions of 'the natural' that led to persecution; different modes of earthly knowledge (or lack thereof) that shaped opportunities for survival; alienation from nature as identity loss; resources, landscapes, weather patterns, plant and animal life that participated in the events, and which shaped and were shaped by human violence. This working group is interested in reassessing and deepening concepts of 'Nazi ecology,' as well as exploring victim experiences in relation to the nonhuman natural world.