Art Spiegelman (February 18)→

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Art Spiegelman

Art Spiegelman

Join us for a virtual conversation with author and illustrator Art Spiegelman, who created the Pulitzer Prize winning Holocaust narrative Maus, portraying Jews as mice and Nazis as cats. The book weaves Spiegelman's account of his tortured relationship with his aging father into a retelling of one of history's most unspeakable tragedies. The book offers an unforgettable story of survival and a disarming look at the legacy of trauma. 

Art Spiegelman will share images from Maus and discuss how they relate to today’s context at home and around the world. Following the presentation, audience members are invited to participate in a Q&A session with the author. 

Orange Shirt Day

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Every child matters. And Orange Shirt Day, a movement that started in Canada to recognize the attrocities carried out against generations of children in boarding schools across Canada, affirms this each year.

The Saginaw Chippewa are recognizing this day as a commemoration of human rights violations that took place locally here in Mount Pleasant and across the United States.

You can read more about Orange Shirt Day here.

What Does It Mean to Be Human?

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2020. It’s been a year like no other, and we’re not yet done with it.

2020. It’s shorthand for a dense tale of human tragedy—death, murders, racial injustice, floods, fires, hurricanes—that many living today have not experienced. We heard our parents’ or grandparents’ tales of wars and devastations and we studied them, too. But this year, we have lived them.

2020 is the year in which we realized that we are very much still human, that we are of our bodies.

Critical Engagements’ focus this year could only be on being human in the ways we have been this year. Below is our revised description for the year ahead.

Be well. Keep well.

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This year’s pandemic, economic chaos, and natural disasters have all underscored how fleeting those basic things that make us human can be: bodies, identities and abilities, languages, families, communities — even our dreams and beliefs have been upended. And with George Floyd’s murder on May 25, 2020, we had yet another devastating reminder of the ongoing ways in which we have seen and defined each other as less than human. 

While this year’s theme can lead us in many directions, we will emphasize in particular the dignities and rights essential to human beings. How do race, gender, sexual preference, and other identities relate to basic human rights across history and today? We will also explore questions around definitions of humanity and language, technology, and sciences because they contribute to our understanding of those identities and rights. While we don’t have all the answers, we know that they are as critical as they are complicated. Please join us as we engage the resources of our university and community to work on a question that matters so very much.

Key Issues and Problems

  • Human identities: gender, race, sexual preference and others

  • Rights, human rights, animal rights

  • Hominids, human origins, biological anthropology

  • Language, linguistics, linguistic anthropology

  • Medical and psychological definitions of life, death, consciousness, personhood

  • Philosophical and religious accounts of life, death, consciousness, personhood

  • Artificial intelligence, artificial consciousness

  • Robots, robot ethics, robot rights, robot definitions; the future of work in a world of robots

  • What does it mean to be humane?