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(12/09/14 2:50am)
It’s truly hard to believe that my last week in South America has arrived. As I sit underneath a glowing sun, my feet pointed toward the Pacific Ocean, my heart grieves at the thought of the chilly winter I know awaits me back home.
(12/01/14 2:48am)
I have discovered that the culmination of every great experience is usually found in a heart-wrenching goodbye.
(11/17/14 6:20pm)
During my last group trip with my program last week, we had a moment that sparked a debate on verbal sexual harassment.
(11/10/14 5:24pm)
Culture and tradition function as important aspects of many Chilean lives. The pride Chileans have for their culture is evidenced in the craftsmanship of their music, art, food and way of living.
(11/03/14 5:17pm)
Some say Halloween is their favorite part of the year. Some say it means Thanksgiving is just around the corner.
(10/29/14 6:02pm)
In my opinion, one of the most incredible things a person can do is see firsthand the things one only sees on postcards, television or magazines. Things that seem impossible to see in real life.
(10/21/14 3:39pm)
One of the reasons I chose to study abroad was to have the opportunity to look at the world from a new perspective. I wanted to look at the world from a place other than the United States.
(10/13/14 4:19pm)
What does three days of biking over hilly terrain under a warm spring sun produce? Incredibly toned legs and a cherry red sunburn.
(10/06/14 4:24pm)
Every morning, I wake up to the sounds of Santiago.
(09/30/14 4:23pm)
If the word “adventure” could appear as a place in this big ol’ world, it would appear as Pucón, Chile.
(09/22/14 4:45pm)
It’s crazy to think I’ve already been in Chile for two months.
(09/15/14 4:39pm)
This week in Chile, a palpable excitement moves through the air, stirring proudly strung Chilean flags and people’s spirits, as the country prepares for a week of festivities in honor of its independence.
(09/08/14 5:41pm)
Life is always on the move.
(09/01/14 5:00pm)
Chileans are not averse to a long workday.
(08/25/14 5:18pm)
One thing that doesn’t change from university to university is balancing a schedule between school, sleep and fun.
(08/18/14 4:56pm)
“How in the world are you gonna order your food down there? They don’t speak English.”
(01/29/14 3:27am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>It all started with a bad view.Cassaundra Huskey said she has looked at the chipping, graffiti-covered back wall of Jake’s Nightclub for years.The building’s vacant black windows face the street, and a sign on the building lists details about its size and where to direct leasing inquires. Once a thriving party hotspot in Bloomington, the exterior of Jake’s Nightclub has slowly deteriorated. After new management remodeled the building into Jake’s Now! Nightclub on Walnut during summer 2012, the bar closed in April 2013.The back wall was still in bad shape.Huskey, a member of Cardinal Fitness on College Avenue, was greeted with the same view of the decrepit wall every time she worked out. She couldn’t help but feel there was something that could be done about it, according to her summary on Indiegogo, a campaign site where people can raise money for theater, film, small businesses and projects. So she started the project “Paint Jake’s Wall.”Huskey researched how much such a project would cost. She began looking up mural paintings online to see if she could get a cost estimate from someone. She eventually got in touch with Miah Michaelsen, assistant director for the Arts in the City of Bloomington, who gave her a list of people the city had worked with before. “I also contacted other people that I had researched on my own through the Internet,” Huskey said, “and that’s how I got in touch with Laura Brikmanis.”Brikmanis, an IU graduate, has worked in Bloomington for years. In 2008 she painted the mural on the back of the Bloomington Playwrights Project, which is in the same building as Jake’s Nightclub.After conducting her research, Huskey decided to bring Brikmanis onboard. “Of the quotes I got, hers was definitely the best-looking quote,” Huskey said. “It was least expensive and the city liked her because she had done the BPP mural. I thought it would be perfect, she could create a nice transition between the two.”Jordan Vukas, the owner of Jake’s Nightclub property since 1986, said he heartily approved of the project. “I was overjoyed that somebody like Cassaundra Huskey undertook this project,” Vukas said. “Once she made the call, I threw my support behind it.”Vukas said since his time as proprietor, there have been five different owners, none of which took proper care of the back wall. Nothing but minimal advertising and peeling paint have graced the wall since 1986. “I think, primarily, tenants in that location have used it to basically put their logo or form of advertising on the back,” Vukas said. “I think they have been lax in utilizing that space, so it became an area that attracted graffiti and was not well kept, which was the responsibility of the tenants.”Vukas said with the right owners, Jake’s Nightclub has the potential to be a great space, whether it is used as a bar, restaurant or office space. He said he hopes the mural will have a positive affect on the location in general. BPP, Vukas’ other tenants, share the building with Jake’s Nightclub. However, there is a clear divide between BPP’s space and Jake’s, Managing Director of BPP Jessica Reed said. She said Brikmanis’ mural has given the entire back of the building a much nicer look.“When Cassaundra brought her on to paint the back of Jake’s, she kept the design of BPP in mind, so there really is a nice flow,” Reed said. The theme of the mural revolves around wildflowers. Inspiration for the theme was derived from “Blooming”-ton itself. Brikmanis said the mural took her about three months to complete. “The mural is approachable by everyone, wildflowers are approachable by everyone,” Brikmanis said. “They’re not always the most beautiful flowers, but anyone can go out and pick a wildflower. I just wanted it to be something that was approachable to everyone and aesthetically pleasing and calming.”Huskey said they made the design simple so that it may be maintained over the years, according to her Indiegogo summary . A complex design might have caused complications later on down the road if Brikmanis was not available to do repairs. Brikmanis signed a contract to maintain the wall for five years, but she said she believes the wall is expected to last much longer. “The mural next to it lasted for more than five years and it still looks good, so hopefully as long as the surface of the wall maintains, it will be fine,” Brikmanis said.The project, which took a lot more work than Huskey originally anticipated, cost $6,250 to complete. Huskey received funds from German American Bancorp, BPP, private donors, Vukas, her own contribution and the Zone Arts Grant from the Bloomington Urban Enterprise Association. A long line of cardio exercise machines stretch down the front of Cardinal Fitness, facing out toward the street. Allyson Kicmal has worked at Cardinal Fitness for six years. She said customers work out for long periods of time on those machines and are greeted with a view of the street, passing cars and adjacent buildings, including the back of Jake’s Nightclub. “Our cardio section has always been there, it’s gonna stay there,” Kicmal said. “I mean, you’re on there for at least 30 minutes at a time staring out. There’s not much change in scenery, so it is nice to have a mural to look at, especially in the winter because it’s so gross outside most of the time anyway.” Kicmal said the wall’s cleaner look will be a great improvement for the customers. A ribbon cutting ceremony took place for the wall on January 23. All that is missing is Brikmanis’ signature and a plaque dedicated to people and corporations involved with the project. “I have the plaque, we’re just waiting for a day when you won’t freeze trying to screw it in,” Huskey said with a laugh. By painting the wall, Huskey said it will hopefully discourage vandals, encourage investment in the neighborhood and make people who drive by it smile, she wrote in her grant application. “There was a lot of graffiti and stuff on it before,” said Lauren Lafferty, customer service specialist at German American Bancorp. “It’s a lot nicer now.”Huskey said she is relieved “Paint Jake’s Wall” is finally complete. Toward the end of the project, Huskey said all she could think about was getting it done.“I kind of lost sight of ‘Hey, this is actually really cool,’” Huskey said. “And so when we had the ribbon cutting ceremony last Thursday, and Miah talked to me, it really made me feel good. It was kind of eye-opening and made me realize that people were happy and excited about it.” Huskey has helped turn something that was once an eyesore into a long stretch of Indiana wildflowers set against the colors of a sunset. “Even if people don’t like it, I like that public art starts a dialogue,” Brikmanis said. “No matter what, I think it has an impact on the community as far as getting people into art.” Follow reporter Makenzie Holland on Twitter @m_holland6.
(07/25/13 1:52am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>“Get out of this country.”“Power-tripping graduate student, trying to impose his leftist liberal views on us. Stop being so heinously flamboyant because it distracts my learning.”These are some of the comments graduate student Gopinaath Kannabiran received on a teacher evaluation for the course I310 — Multimedia Arts and Technology — he taught last spring. “When I got this feedback, I was like trying to, for a few hours, I was just trying to think, ‘who could have done this?’” Kannabiran said. Kannabiran was sitting and browsing early in the morning when he first saw the feedback.“I’m trying to intentionally try and imagine each and every person’s face,” he said. “I knew all of them, I get to know my students very personally, I bake stuff for them and bring it to class and all of that stuff and we joke around, so I treat them pretty much as equals for all purposes, unless they require me to step to another power. Otherwise I don’t do that.”Kannabiran said he felt a physical shock after reading the racist and homophobic comments on his evaluation. It was something he was not used to seeing at IU. Kannabiran moved to the United States from India in the fall of 2008 to get his master’s degree from IU. He has many friends in the School of Informatics where he teaches and studies, friends who gave him support when he came out to his parents and friends who gave him support after he received this negative feedback. “I never felt like I was a gay person or an Indian person or a graduate student,” he said. “I just felt like, ‘No, I’m just another person here. In a way, my world was very shielded, in a way that is not reality.’”Kannabiran said only when he steps outside the safety net of Bloomington is he very much reminded he is an international person of color who is gay.“It’s a very physical feeling, it’s not just a mental feeling,” Kannabiran said.Doug Bauder, coordinator of GLBT Support Services at IU, said he was struck by how visibly shaken Kannabiran was after receiving the evaluation. “Periodically we get complaints of students harassing each other in the classroom, but it’s usually in the residence hall or a fraternity or on the street,” Bauder said. “The classroom tends to be a little safer. Maybe that’s another reason Gopi felt so violated, because you expect people to be somehow respectful in that setting.”Kannabiran said after reading the comment, he felt physically unsafe. “This comment was like a lightning bolt, just hitting that way,” Kannabiran said. “I am used to bullying. I’ve been bullied a lot both here and in India ... For two days, for two whole days, I did not feel safe to step outside of my home. I felt very physically violated.”Kannabiran said he is open to any critique on his teaching and is willing to learn and become a better teacher, but the comments he received were intentionally directed at him and very personal. “This is the thing which people don’t understand,” Kannabiran said. “When all is said and done, I am here all by myself. I have wonderful friends who would just, like, drop everything and come to me if I needed them. I don’t know who this person is, and this is very clearly hateful and personal.”Bauder said this incident was the most severe case’s of discrimination he had seen this past school year.“The most standard response we get when someone has written something really offensive on someone’s dry erase board in the residence hall, an email or something like that, ‘it was just a joke,’” Bauder said. “They think it’s funny and they just don’t get that what they think is funny isn’t for everyone.”Feeling safe is something Kannabiran lost for a long time after reading the feedback. “The issue of safety is not felt the same way by everyone,” Kannabiran said. “Those few moments, I got a glimpse of what it feels like to feel physically unsafe, but there’s nothing around me which is physical which is threatening to me. “It’s literally, physically arresting. I just sat down on the couch for three hours and I couldn’t move. The intensity of that is something you can never explain to someone else. It’s just something you have to experience. It’s just hard. There’s no other way.”Though Kannabiran was shaken after receiving the feedback, support from his friends at IU and India, as well as a long month of personal reflection brought him peace on the matter. “Within a week I realized this is a single incident,” Kannabiran said. “Then I slowly started analyzing, what is personal and what is not personal. It took me almost a month to come to that place of what is personal and what is not and how I need to handle this. I felt I was at a stable place. I was not holding any grudge. Basically, I’ve made my peace with it, at least on a personal basis.”Being a teacher is not for everyone, Kannabiran said. However, it is the career he continues to pursue. He said this incident allowed him to grow in his role as a teacher.“That is where I think I, as a teacher, have work to do,” Kannabiran said. “Something about me, the way I conducted myself, probably must have made this person feel unwelcome or threatened, that they couldn’t feel like they could come and talk to me about this.”Kannabiran said that after his class ended, a student took him out to lunch and gave him a card in appreciation of his teaching. “To me, that’s all that matters,” he said. “I open the drawer and I see that and then I feel like, ‘OK, somebody thinks I’m good at this and I need to keep doing it.’”
(07/22/13 1:03am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>A Memorandum of Understanding regarding the proposed merger with the IU School of Journalism and the departments of Telecommunications and Communication and Culture was recently released to inform concerned parties how the nationally accredited IU School of Journalism will maintain its reputation and academic integrity within the new school if the merger is approved by the IU Board of Trustees in August.As a number of concerns have arisen concerning the proposed merger, Interim Dean of the School of Journalism Lesa Hatley Major said she sees a more cutting edge school arising from the merge pending its approval. “There are so many opportunities for us,” Hatley Major said. “We keep doing all the things that we’ve always done well, but we’re obligated to make sure that our students get what they need when they leave. To me, that’s something we have to make sure we do. I think that with this move, and I think our faculty, staff, everybody wants to make sure that happens, that we can use this opportunity to create a school that is innovative.”One of the concerns Hatley Major addressed was the journalism school faculty who would be affected by this merger. The MOU, Hatley Major said, protects journalism untenured, tenured track, lecturers and associate professors being promoted to full. Faculty will be presented with the option to choose if they wish to go through the College tenure or continue under the School of Journalism.“It would be unfair and unethical if you had a junior faculty or associate who has been working under a certain system preparing their dossier and then all of a sudden you have a change in the way that was done,” Hatley Major said. “So they’re covered.”During the process of developing the MOU, Hatley Major said committees consisting of faculty and staff were put together and websites were created allowing comments to be heard from alumni, students, faculty and staff regarding both the MOU and the merger.Hatley Major said she and others working on the MOU looked at comments on the websites, from both student and alumni, and in order to organize the document looked back to the original accreditation standards. While working with the College, Hatley Major said those involved were respectful and positive about making sure journalism has the foundation it needs to be successful.“I think some people thought that this was going to be something where it was negotiation,” Hatley Major said. “It really wasn’t. The idea was always to have this kind of foundation document that would serve journalism and protect the foundation of journalism as we move forward.”The proposal revision remains the next step in the creation of the new school. The first opportunity the proposal has to be presented to the Board of Trustees is August, but Hatley Major said she does not know if this time has been confirmed. The next possible time would be in October. Hatley Major said the key components in making this merger a success are keeping up with what the School of Journalism already does well and opening up opportunities for improvement. “What I see right now are things being put in place to not only preserve what we are, but to make us better,” Hatley Major said. “I’m committed and so are the faculty and staff. I’m committed to making sure that this happens, meaning I’m not going anywhere. I love this school and the people and the students and our alumni ... I feel like I have a responsibility to make sure that happens.”
(07/18/13 12:46am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>As the IU Board of Trustees’ August meeting at IU-Purdue University Indianapolis is now less than a month away, a crucial decision will soon be made regarding the fate of the IU School of Journalism.In February 2013, Provost Lauren Robel recommended in her State of the Campus address that the School of Journalism merge with the departments of Telecommunications and Communication and Culture.On July 12, a letter addressing Alumni and a memorandum of understanding were released by School of Journalism Interim Dean Lesa Hatley Major. Major was appointed July 1 in place of exiting Interim Dean Michael Evans. The Memorandum of Understanding, a five-page document based on input from alumni, faculty, staff and students of the school and several others, is an outline of how the nationally accredited journalism school will maintain its reputation and academic integrity within the new school if the merger is approved. The MOU was drafted by the School of Journalism and the College of Arts and Sciences per request of the provost. “We have heard from hundreds of alumni about this recommended new school, and we are very grateful for your ideas and support,” Major said in the letter. “Your concern about the future of journalism at IU has helped underscore the passion and commitment we all feel toward journalism education and has strengthened our position as we move toward the creation of the new school.”JR Ross, president of the IU School of Journalism Alumni Board, voiced several concerns he and other alumni still have with the merger and the MOU.“The MOU shows how they’re going to protect journalism, but we still don’t know how they’re going to enhance journalism,” Ross said. “If you’re going to take one of the best schools in the country and essentially blow it up and start over, you have to kind of show that there’s going to be a benefit to this.”Ross questioned how big the budget is going to be following the establishment of the new school, what the curriculum is going to look like and even how the journalism schools’ namesake is going to be honored.“There are a lot of alums who their biggest issue is moving out of Ernie Pyle Hall,” Ross said. “They must not have been here the past twenty years to see how cramped it is, but they have an emotional attachment to Ernie Pyle Hall and that whole thing ... there are still significant concerns about what’s happening.”The next step in the creation of the new school lies in the revision of the proposal submitted to the provost last December. The School of Journalism and the College of Arts and Sciences will work together to revise the proposal, which was initially submitted by a committee of representatives from journalism, telecommunications and communication and culture.“The proposal will serve as a framework around which we will build the new school,” Major said in the letter. “It will be specific enough to support and enhance our research mission and ensure we have the means to advance such signature programs as the Ernie Pyle Scholars and our travel courses.”The Trustees’ approved renovations in Franklin Hall during their meeting at IUPUI in June. These renovations are being made to accommodate the school and student media, including the Indiana Daily Student, the Arbutus, Inside Magazine, American Student Radio, WIUX, IUSTV and other course-based media enterprises, according to the letter. “I’ve talked to the provost and I believe in her heart of hearts she thinks this is the best way forward with journalism,” Ross said. “I do not think she’s trying to destroy journalism at all. We just have a fundamental disagreement on how best to move forward with the school. I do believe the faculty, and Lesa, are doing their best to produce the best possible outcome and I just keep my fingers crossed that it works.”Memorandum of Understanding key pointsThese points taken from the Memorandum of Understanding will only take effect if the merger is officially approved in August by the IU Board of Trustees. Here is what you need to know from the MOU. • The newly merged school will be established effective July 1, 2014. • Journalism faculty and staff positions, services and programs will maintain their current forms for five years following the establishment of the new school. • Previous philanthropic gifts to the School of Journalism will transfer to and remain with the new journalism program. • Donors may continue to designate gifts specifically for journalism following the merger. • The merged school’s new location in Franklin Hall will accommodate student media, including the Indiana Daily Student, IUSTV and others. • Undergraduate students admitted to IUB in the Fall of 2013 and Spring 2014 will follow the 2013-14 SOJ Bulletin requirements for a degree. • Students arriving after Spring 2014 will follow requirements in place at the time of their arrival. Graduate students, both M.A. and Ph.D. will follow the same timeline. • The College stipulates that SOJ courses and faculty teaching public relations and advertising will remain in the DOJ. • The name of the department, formerly the SOJ, will be determined by faculty in the department in consultation with the Dean of the School.