Today’s News from the University of Kansas
From the Office of Public Affairs | http://www.news.ku.edu
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Kansas Economic Policy Conference to address policy interventions in times of crisis
LAWRENCE — The 2020 Kansas Economic Policy Conference will focus on the question of what is the government’s role in addressing the ongoing COVID-19 crisis and its broader implications. The virtual event Oct. 22, which is free and open to the public, will include state legislators, policymakers and University of Kansas researchers.
New book details power of paratext in medieval works
LAWRENCE – A University of Kansas researcher’s new book, “Inscribing Knowledge in the Medieval Book: The Power of Paratexts,” pays particular attention to the political power relationships of the Middle Ages.
KU Serves Week focuses on voter education
LAWRENCE — The Center for Service Learning’s fall KU Serves Week is taking place this week (Oct. 5-9) in conjunction with National Voter Education Week. During this week, the CSL and their Civic Engagement Ambassador partners are sharing information about registering to vote, learning about candidates and more through events, social media and a new Civic Engagement Hub.
Full stories below.
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Contact: Carrie Caine, Institute for Policy & Social Research, 785-864-9102, [email protected]
Kansas Economic Policy Conference to address policy interventions in times of crisis
LAWRENCE — When the novel coronavirus pandemic hit the United States in March 2020, government at all levels needed to manage a public health crisis, continue providing essential services and stave off economic disaster. However, public health interventions, such as stay-at-home orders and contact tracing, have had mixed reception from the public and mixed support from government officials. The 2020 Kansas Economic Policy Conference, taking place virtually Oct. 22, will address the question: What is the role of government in a crisis?
“Some people think that government is a problem. But when an international crisis like COVID-19 takes place, we look to government for solutions,” said Donna Ginther, Roy A. Roberts Distinguished Professor of Economics and director of the Institute for Policy & Social Research (IPSR). “I’m excited that this year’s Kansas Economic Policy Conference will tackle the important question of what is government’s role in addressing the ongoing COVID-19 crisis. What worked and what didn’t? And what should state and local governments be doing as the crisis continues and potentially worsens with winter coming?”
Speakers and panels will address this topic from several angles. Ginther will offer a keynote address on the Kansas economy, and Bill Murphy, deputy secretary of the Kansas Department of Commerce, will offer a keynote on economic development in the context of the pandemic.
The conference will continue with conversations on public health, education and broadband, and policy solutions for moving from crisis to recovery. Several Kansas legislators and policymakers will serve as panelists:
- Lt. Governor Lynn Rogers
- State Sen. Carolyn McGinn (R-Sedgwick)
- State Rep. Stephanie Clayton (D-Overland Park)
- State Rep. Troy Waymaster (R-Bunker Hill)
- Dr. Lee Norman, Secretary of the Kansas Department of Health and Environment
- Maj. Gen. David Weishaar, the adjutant general of Kansas
- Shannon Kimball, Lawrence Public Schools Board of Education.
The conversations will also feature Brad Bergsma, vice president of information technology and athletics of Northwest Kansas Technical College, and Catherine Moyer, CEO and general manager of Pioneer Communications.
KU researchers Tami Gurley, associate professor of population health; Ward Lyles, associate professor of urban planning; and Germaine Halegoua, associate professor of film & media studies, will contribute to the conversations as well.
Jim McLean, managing director of Kansas News Service, and Deb Miller, director of the KU Public Management Center in the School of Public Affairs & Administration, will moderate the conversations.
The conference has been streamed online for several years now, and this year, it will take place entirely online. Thanks in part to University Center CARES Act (Coronavirus Act, Relief, and Economic Security Act) funding from the Economic Development Administration, the conference is free and will be live-captioned. The afternoon will conclude with a virtual happy hour so that attendees can directly talk with each other.
“Hosting the conference online will ensure the safety of all attendees and still provide an outlet for us to discuss the economic challenges in Kansas. A benefit of hosting the conference in a virtual format is that we are able to welcome all Kansans and others interested in the Kansas economy free access to our annual conference,” said Jena Gunter, assistant director of IPSR.
IPSR staff, together with Ginther, have been collecting and disseminating information about the spread and the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic since March. Resources are gathered online and include presentations from Ginther on the economic consequences of the pandemic, briefings on federal stimulus funds in Kansas, reports focused on healthy recovery in five Kansas counties and a gallery of maps and graphs.
Kansas Economic Policy Conference registration is free and open to all who wish to attend. Visit https://ipsr.ku.edu/conferen/kepc2020/ to see a detailed program for the afternoon and to register.
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Contact: Rick Hellman, KU News Service, 785-864-8852, [email protected], @RickHellman
New book details power of paratext in medieval works
LAWRENCE – Back in the days before hyperlinks – before the printed page, even – how did people make reference to one written work within the body of another? How did they relate a historic account to the context of then current times?
What they would do is literally tear up the book: They inserted new sections. Or they added prologues and epilogues. Or they added illustrations before, during and after the main text, calling attention to the book’s translator, or to its intended royal recipient, or to a particular plot point.
These and other examples of what scholars call paratext – the stuff inscribed in the margins or otherwise added to an “original” text – are the subject of the new book “Inscribing Knowledge in the Medieval Book: The Power of Paratexts” (DeGruyter, 2020), co-written and co-edited by Anne Hedeman, Judith Harris Murphy Distinguished Professor of Art History at the University of Kansas.
The book pays particular attention to the political power relationships that are revealed in paratexts of the Middle Ages.
Hedeman said the book grew out of a symposium held at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Orleans, France, a couple of years ago, at which scholars from varying fields discussed their work on paratexts.
Because the hand-copied books that survived from this era were often held in the libraries of noblemen involved in political, religious and military conflicts, “We thought it would be interesting to consider the idea of power,” Hedeman said in a recent interview. “How could this material object be used, either by the people for whom it was being made, or by the authors, or by the scribes who wrote it, or by the artists, to shade or express power of various sorts.”
Hedeman wrote one chapter and edited others that related to her specialty – the history of art.
She chose to write about two particular paratexts in a chapter titled “Translating Prologues and Prologue Illustration in French Historical Texts.”
The first paratext Hedeman reviews is a history that translates as “The Great Chronicle of France.” In this book, originally written circa 1275-1280 and amended in the late 1300s/early 1400s, “it is the chancellor of France who’s intervening to make it tighter for King Charles V — taking the book apart, adding to it, binding it and again taking it apart, adding to it and binding it again,” Hedeman said.
“As the text kept getting added to and unbound and things put it in and pictures put in, there was one point where the king made a political speech in front of the Holy Roman Emperor,” she said. “And in the speech, which gets described in the edition, he showed all kinds of documents. And somebody went back and realized half those documents weren’t in the manuscript. So they went back in the book and cut pages out and inserted new pages with the documents transcribed. That is a level of paratextual embellishment that is just crazy. And in a sense, it’s very modern, resembling the way we think about propaganda.”
The second book about which Hedeman writes is Laurent de Premierfait’s circa 1410 translation into French of Giovanni Boccaccio’s 1355-1360 compilation of biographies in Latin titled “Of Famous Men and Women.”
She studied two copies of the work prepared for King Charles’ brother and nephew – Duke John of Berry and Duke John the Fearless of Burgundy, respectively.
In these books, the most striking features of the paratextual additions are the colorful illustrations, or illuminations, of scenes described in the text.
“What I was trying to show with those examples is the ways in which, with visual imagery, there could be inclusion and exclusion,” Hedeman said. “I considered the balance between density of illustration versus no illustration. All of those things can, through this sort of paratextual visual material, really focus your attention.”
If not exactly akin to comic books, Hedeman said, books produced for nobles in this period were expected to contain artwork.
“If books didn’t have lots of pictures, they didn’t catch on,” Hedeman said. “Illustrations were just part of an expectation for history, and they saw this Boccaccio as being history. So they had to be there to be appealing.”
Hedeman said these illustrations also helped the books become popular once they were more widely distributed among the literate public.
These interventions were intended not only for the royal recipients of the hand-made books, Hedeman said, but also for historians like herself.
“I think it was done partly to shape history, sure,” she said, “because if this is the official book, or one of the official books that’s in the royal or ducal libraries, subsequent readers will pull it off the shelf to find authoritative accounts.”
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Contact: Millinda Fowles, Career & Experiential Learning, [email protected], @kucareer
KU Serves Week focuses on voter education
LAWRENCE — The Center for Service Learning’s (CSL) fall KU Serves Week is taking place this week (Oct. 5-9) in conjunction with National Voter Education Week. During this week, the CSL and their Civic Engagement Ambassador partners are sharing information about registering to vote, learning about candidates on the ballot and more through events and social media.
The Civic Engagement Ambassadors involves representatives at the University of Kansas who are interested in advancing civic engagement, including voting, for students, faculty and staff. George Midgett, director of Student-Athlete Development, Leadership & Outreach, serves as an ambassador and has worked with student-athletes to develop the Jayhawk Athlete Movement.
“In the endless pursuit of equality and equity, the Jayhawk Athlete Movement was created to provide student-athletes a platform for them to engage, educate, empower and evolve their fellow athletes and the Jayhawk community on the issues of social injustice, systemic racism and the power of voting. While there is no panacea for today’s injustice, we are working to show students that their voices and actions matter. By standing and fighting together, they are ensuring that their appeals will not go unheard,” Midgett said.
The Educate and Act: Civic Engagement in 2020 series continues with “Queering the Vote,” which will take place at 6 p.m. today, Oct. 8. The event will be held over Zoom and will feature expert panelists from KU and the surrounding community.
This collaborative partnership between the Center for Service Learning, The Commons, and the Emily Taylor Center for Women & Gender Equity creates opportunities to learn about democracy and empower attendees to participate in civic action.
“Exercising our civic responsibility through voting should be unifying. It is important to consider how engagement in the civic process may be experienced differently by various groups of our KU campus community. Each of us can contribute to setting the conditions in which all Jayhawks feel safe, supported, and empowered to be civically engaged,” said Jomella Watson-Thompson, director of the Center for Service Learning.
Additionally, the Center for Service Learning is unveiling its new Civic Engagement Hub this week, which will serve as a one-stop shop for students, faculty, staff, and others interested engaging in civic action.
“Fostering democratic ideals and civic engagement across KU, in every way we can, should feel like a responsibility to every member of the Jayhawk community. Students are often inexperienced voters and lack civic engagement experiences, so creating a positive culture around civic engagement for KU students can combat this issue and contribute to the development of lifelong civically aware community members that our society so desperately needs,” said Logan Stenseng, Student Senate KU Government Relations director and KU Civic Engagement Ambassador.
For a full list of events occurring during KU Serves Week, visit csl.ku.edu/ku-serves-week.
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