Greetings to our WCCFT Community!
I hope you all had an enjoyable and productive summer. I am amazed that we are already in week 4 of the semester (week 5 at private colleges). I am glad to be back in the classroom. And although we have only had two WCCFT meetings, so far (an E-Board meeting and a Members meeting), I feel a renewed sense of enthusiasm and hope amongst our members. On Sept. 13, WCCFT President, Jim Werner hosted the first in-person Members meeting since Covid struck. The meeting was preceded by a lunch with 60-70 WCCFT members and non-members.
I caught the energy of the in-person meeting and, as the WCCFT Adjunct Representative, I will organize a meeting of Adjuncts in October, date/time to be determined.
The purpose of the meeting will be to provide Adjuncts (members and non-members) with information about the WCCFT and to create an opportunity to simply meet each other.
October is Adjunct Month!
Because of this, I have decided to use this contribution to WCCFT Connect to highlight the brilliance of our teaching and non-teaching Adjunct Faculty, who work side-by-side with our equally brilliant full-time colleagues. Many of us are life-long academic mercenaries who race from college to college in order to teach as many courses or counsel as many students as we can to pay the bills. Others of us have full-time professions and teach a course or two at WCC. Most of us are active outside the classroom, conducting and publishing research, making documentary films or podcasts, displaying art in exhibitions, etc. But as Adjuncts, these academic, artistic, or professional accomplishments generally go unnoticed at WCC.
Claudia Jacques de Moraes Cardoso, Senior Adjunct in Art & Design, was very active in summer 2023. She participated in the FEMeeting Conference in Taos, New Mexico in July where she was co-leader of the Five Chairs workshop and co-presenter of Ecologies to Cosmologies: Technoetic Offerings (https://femeeting.com/2023/06/19/news-program-femeeting-women-in-art-science-and-technology-2023/). Claudia presented remote discussions Double Consciousness on Technoetic Aesthetics at Leonardo LASER Talks at Roy Ascott Studio (Shanghai, China) and Andrea’s Room Offerings: Syncretic Entanglement in the Meta-Environment in Beyond Human-non-Human: Ecologies-as-Cosmologies panel at Xeno Paisajes, (Bogota, Colombia). In August, she was Promoted to Associate Editor for the academic journal Cybernetics and Human Knowing Vol 30 (1-2)
This summer, Edward Cromarty, an Adjunct who teaches the First Year Studies course, completed a Library of Congress Grant Scholarship certification from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, XMedia Lab: Teaching with Primary Sources and Humanizing Stories Told Across Media, Certificate Granted Scholarship, TPS East Region grant from the Library of Congress Harvard University, Graduate School of Education, Harvard XMedia Lab, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
He also published 3 articles:
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- Cromarty, E. (Approved 2023). The Academization of the Jonestown Experience. Jonestown Report, Jonestown Institute, San Diego State University.
- Cromarty, E. (2023). This Flickering Cave: Glowworms and Starlight. This Flickering Cave. Linking Worlds: An International Literary and Artistic Project
- Cromarty, E., Young, M. A., Elias, S. (2023). The use of film to motivate interest in learning through imagination and diverse thinking in students having learning differences in higher education. Journal for Research Initiatives, 7(3). Fayetteville State University (UNCFSU), Department of Education. https://digitalcommons.uncfsu.edu/jri
Eric De Sena, Adjunct in the History and Art History departments, was recently elected to Chair the East European and Eurasian Interest Group of the Archaeological Institute of America. In this role, he promotes scholarship in this broad region, publishes a newsletter, and sponsors sessions at the annual AIA Meetings. He also submitted three articles in summer 2023: “Visual Identities and Differences” and “The Erotic, the Obscene, and the Pornographic” will be published in the Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Visual Culture (edited by Jane Kromm). Both articles focus upon themes in ancient Mediterranean art. The third article, “Supply Patterns in Dacia Porolissensis: Pottery Evidence from the Porolissum Forum Project,” will be published in a Festschrift for Archer Martin (Andrew Donnelly, Justin Leidwanger, and Joey Williams, eds).
Rory Duffy, an Adjunct in the History Department, is completing production of a documentary on Northern Ireland and Brexit. https://vimeo.com/785491036
Zsuzsanna Kozmane-Fejes, Senior Adjunct in the Mathematics Department, completed her PhD in Mathematics Education at Teachers College, Columbia University in February 2023. The title of the dissertation is The History of Periodicals in Hungarian Secondary Mathematics Education Between 1867 and 1956
Rachel Wineberg, Senior adjunct in the English Department, recently completed Stanford University’s Online Novel Writing Certification Program. If you see me writing at The Gateway, you will know I’m hard at work on the last two chapters of the first draft of my novel, Plague Stories!
In solidarity,
Eric C. De Sena
WCCFT Adjunct Representative
Member of the WCCFT Negotiation Team
Please reach out to Eric De Sena at ericdwccft@gmail.com for any union-related concerns and/or to send me news items for future issues of FTConnect.
