UT Mic/Nite | The University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Faculty and Staff:

Twice a year, the Office of the Provost hosts Mic/Nite, a “Pecha-Kucha Powered” social gathering designed to enhance the intellectual, interdisciplinary, and cultural life of the faculty and staff at UT Knoxville.

One of the challenges in a large university community is working across the silos that often separate disciplines. Mic/Nite offers an opportunity to build bridges and foster a deeper appreciation of the many facets of a large, comprehensive university. Presentations offer a cross section of the intellectual life of UT Knoxville and provide an opportunity for social interaction among faculty and staff who may not otherwise have the opportunity to interact with each other.

For the Event:

We remind our guests that UT Mic/Nite is an event for UT faculty and staff and is not open to students or the general public. [Partners are welcome.] Relix Variety Theatre is located at 1208 N Central St, Knoxville, TN 37917. Parking is available behind the venue on Anderson Avenue and on surrounding streets.

Free pizza and a cash bar are available.

What is Pecha-Kucha?

Pecha-Kucha is a simple presentation format that features twenty images displayed for twenty seconds each. The images automatically forward as the presenter talks. To learn more, visit the Pecha-Kucha FAQ. Samples are posted on the Pecha-Kucha Presentations page.

The format originated in Tokyo, Japan. It was first introduced in 2003 and has spread to more than 400 cities around the world. The format allows presenters to depict and describe everything from urban design or economic theory to a series of photographs. Mic/Nite is held in cooperation with PechaKucha Night Knoxville, which was started in 2011 to encourage intellectual and cultural dialogue. Mic/Nites are special interdisciplinary events that facilitate dialogue between university faculty and staff by showcasing the academic pursuits of the campus.

Explore Pecha Kucha events from around the world: PechaKucha 20×20 – Official Site | PechaKucha 20×20 – Knoxville | PechaKucha 20×20 – FAQ

Fall 2024 Topics

Comparative Politics and Public Administration Insights on America’s Civil-Military Relations Crisis

Vasabjit Banerjee, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, College of Arts and Sciences

The U.S. military has enjoyed bipartisan popularity since the 1990s, but trust is declining along partisan lines. Officers and enlisted personnel are increasingly involved in partisan politics. City police are becoming more like the military than civilian law and order institutions. Why is militarization of politics occurring at the federal, state, and local levels? My colleagues and I present three explanations largely ignored by scholars and practitioners who see the military as focused on war fighting, while civilians focus on politics. First, politicians use the military to forward partisan aims. Second, the National Guard deals with competing civilian principles, i.e., those of the President, Congress, governors, and state legislatures, who have various and often conflicting aims. Third, economic elites’ loss of confidence in city government led to abdication of governance and budgets to police. To address these issues, we propose a theory of civil-military relations based on accountability.

Image Source: Matt Hecht

Metabolomes and Microbiomes: An Organic Chemist’s Thoughts on Metabolites, Microbes, and Mass Spectrometry

Shawn Campagna, Ph.D., Professor, Department of Chemistry, College of Arts and Sciences and Scientific Programs Director, University of Tennessee-Oak Ridge Innovation Institute

Over the last half century, the ability to study the complexity of life has rapidly increased due to the development of chemical tools that have allowed us to address the complexity of living systems in unprecedented ways. This has led to the understanding that the many thousands of microbes (i.e. the microbiome that is composed of bacteria, fungi, protozoa, bacteriophages, and viruses) in the human environment and body pattern a highly complex chemical milieu to which we are exposed and process many of the foods that we consume before digestion as well. From a chemical perspective, the structure and function for the majority of metabolites produced by the microbiome remain unknown. This presentation will highlight efforts to understand the complex microbial and chemical ecologies that pattern host-microbe interactions and propose ways in which such information can be used to better environmental and human health outcomes.

Image Source: National Human Genome Research Institute

Game on “Japan”: How Video Games are Reimagining Premodern Culture

Małgorzata (Gosia) K. Citko-DuPlantis, Pd.D., Assistant Professor in Japanese Literature and Culture, Department of World Languages and Cultures, College of Arts and Sciences

Video games have become one of the most dynamic and powerful forms of cultural production, offering an interactive experience to diverse communities worldwide. They often present cultures in new and unexpected ways to create entertainment. Game designers and writers in the West, rarely trained in cultural studies, history, and languages, usually refer to a collective imagination of various cultures instead of research-based knowledge. Relying on stereotypes and clichés, which can distort and reinterpret facts, they alter perceptions of the cultures they draw from. This is especially true for how aspects of premodern Japanese culture are represented in popular video games produced outside of Japan. Processed through creative retranslation not always able to balance entertainment with cultural authenticity, ethical representation, and responsibility to intellectual history, “Japan” imagined in non-Japanese video games is often exoticized, historically remixed, and commodified. But it also promotes Japanese studies during the humanities crisis at all stages of education.

A Journey towards Neuroinclusivity in Business Higher Ed

Lauren Cunningham, Ph.D., Keith Stanga Professor of Accounting, Haslam College of Business

Recall the last time you learned something so impactful that you realized you would never be able to look at the world the same way again. For me, it was sitting in a presentation where a speaker was describing her personal neurodivergences and how they have impacted her educational and professional journeys. In that moment, I felt like I better understood myself and I better understood so many interactions with loved ones, students, and colleagues. Little did I know that at the same time I was having my ‘ah ha’ moment, others in my college were having their own. This presentation shares the [in-progress] journey of a small group of faculty and staff in the Haslam College of Business who are passionate about neuroinclusivity and are working together to create environments that support the unique superpowers, perspectives, and needs of our neurodivergent students and colleagues.

Image Source: Generated with Canva’s AI Magic Media tool, 2024

Going Above and Beyond the (Black) Bear Minimum in Wildlife Population Disease Research

Richard Gerhold, DVM, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Biomedical and Diagnostic Sciences, College of Veterinary Medicine

The Great Smoky Mountain National Park (GSMNP) has the highest density of black bears in the eastern United States and bear populations are expanding throughout areas of Tennessee. The expanding bear populations coincide with increase human presence and urbanization leading to bear-human or bear-domestic animal interactions. Historically, there has been minimal research on baseline health indices and disease etiologies in black bears in Tennessee. Since 2020, our research group has collaborated with the GSMNP and the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency to determine the distribution, frequency, and population impacts of various infectious and non-infectious diseases in the Tennessee bear populations. We have disclosed a high frequency of a relatively novel blood parasite in bears and documented pathogens having potential public health and/or domestic animal implications. However, harmful anthropogenic actions, particularly feeding bears, are the most significant factor threatening bear populations, indicating public education is needed for bear conservation in Tennessee.

Interpersonal Influence and Misinformation within a Population: Do you trust your friends and family?

Michael Kotowski, Ph.D., Associate Professor, School of Communication Studies, College of Communication and Information

With over 50% of U.S. adults sometimes or often obtaining their news from social media according to Pew (2023), information presented on these platforms spreads easily and can quickly influence public opinion. Because of the power of interpersonal influence among friends and family within a social network, an online influencer need only convince a small fraction of the general population in order to powerfully influence the majority. As long as a small group of opinion leaders within the network are initially duped, even the most outlandish misinformation claims can spread easily throughout a social network by way of interpersonal connections. We trust others we know personally, so we are likely to believe what they tell us, even if the same information originating from a mediated source would be readily dismissed as false or inaccurate. Understanding these processes has critically important implications for democracy, business, and interpersonal relationships alike.

Image Source: Grandjean, Martin (2014). “La connaissance est un réseau“. Les Cahiers du Numérique 10 (3): 37-54. DOI:10.3166/LCN.10.3.37-54.

Building Community Trust in Police through Collaboration

Jack Mewhirter, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Baker School of Public Policy & Public Affairs

This presentation examines the various policy tools and interventions that police departments can implement to foster community trust and promote more positive, safer police-community interactions. I begin by discussing well-established policies and programs—such as community policing, body-worn cameras, and diversifying police forces—before turning to new, original research on the potential positive effects of collaborative police policymaking. I present evidence from a community-engaged research project conducted within the context of the Cincinnati Collaborative Agreement: a court-mandated partnership between civil society groups and the Cincinnati Police Department, created in the wake of the 2001 Cincinnati unrest. The findings show that collaborative policymaking under this agreement has transformed community perceptions of their representation in policing policy, resulting in improved perceptions towards and interactions with the police.

Image Source: Generated with DALL-E 3, 2024

Growing Cultures Safely in a Lab as a Model for Growing Lab Safety Culture

Sarah Mobley, PhD, PE, University Laboratory Safety Committee Chair, Senior Lecturer, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Doug Aaron, PhD, Associate Department Head, Research Associate Professor, Department of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Biomedical Engineering

For a living culture to thrive in a laboratory setting, you must prepare the environment, introduce nourishment, and then patiently incubate. To positively influence the safety culture for a set of laboratory users, you must assess the environment, introduce the catalyst, and be persistently patient. The parallels between these two processes are more than merely phonetic. As universities all over the world begin to deliberately focus on improving safety culture, UTK is emerging as a leader in the field. Not unlike the successful creation of a laboratory specimen, this outcome has relied heavily on improving the environment in small ways to create opportunities for growth. This presentation will focus on the ways in which the Tickle College of Engineering, and the University of Tennessee as a whole, have worked to improve laboratory environments thus stimulating positive cultural change.

Image Source: Generated with Co-Pilot, 2024

Twinning! Explorations in Fidelity & Memory using Digital Twin

Farre “Faye” Nixon, Assistant Professor, School of Landscape Architecture (SoLA), College of Architecture & Design (CoAD)

The digital twin – a virtual representation of an object or process – holds much potential, especially when updated in “real-time” to reflect the current state of its physical proxy.

Digital twins aim to optimize by increasing accuracy in scenario planning and reducing uncertainty in decision making. As such, they are quickly becoming invaluable tools across several industries; however their applicability to natural environments is underdeveloped since landscapes are messy and difficult to replicate at a high fidelity.

Using projects conducted by graduate landscape architecture students, this research explores (1) how designers might leverage existing technical skills to produce low-fidelity twins of local landscapes; (2) how digital twins can store and represent tacit, embodied, or phenomenological data; and (3) what value a low-fidelity, low-resolution digital twin might yield as a platform for speculation.

The research concludes with reflections on integrating the technology into architectural pedagogy from both an aspirational and critical perspective.

An Empirical Basis for Aesthetics in Deaf Pedagogy

Michael E. Skyer, PhD, Assistant Professor of Deaf Studies, Theory & Practice in Teacher Education, College of Education, Health, and Human Sciences

Art and design are underappreciated levers of power in deaf education. The philosophical domain of axiology is decomposed into ethics on one side and aesthetics on the other. Minimal research has been undertaken to operationalize deaf-positive axiologies in instructional events, which are ethical and aesthetic at once. As part of my dissertation study, I examined how ethical conflicts—such as about the value of sign languages—have stymied the development of empirical research about deaf pedagogy. By researching six case studies, I uncovered latent power dynamics and documented effective approaches to teaching and learning that involved deaf students and deaf faculty working toward mutually beneficial ends. My grounded theory about interactions provides an empirical basis for understanding relationships between people, pedagogies, curriculum, and content-area knowledge. Among other key lessons, my research suggests that multimodal transduction is a promising but under-theorized area where, as knowledge changes form, new realities are manifested.