The Department of Philosophy presents the annual Evelyn Barker Memorial Lecture, featuring Miranda Fricker, who will speak on What's the Point of Blaming and Forgiving? This event is part of the spring 2023 Humanities Forum. Blaming someone for a wrong done further disrupts your relationship with them; forgiving them restores that relationship, at least in some measure. In this talk, Miranda Fricker will explore these apparently opposed moral-relational energies, examining their various moral-social values.

The Humanities Forum presents sound researcher Mack Hagood, associate professor of media and communication at Miami University, who will speak on Canceling Noise: Dreams and Dangers. In this talk, Hagood presents a cultural history of noise and its control, listening in to noisy moments in Ancient Rome, Victorian England, colonial West Africa, and the contemporary United States.

The Humanities Forum presents Theresa Runstedtler, associate professor of history at American University, who will discuss “The Punch”: NBA Basketball and Constructions of Black Criminality. On December 9, 1977, the Los Angeles Lakers’ African American power forward Kermit Washington punched the Houston Rockets’ white guard Rudy Tomjanovich, knocking him out with season-ending injuries. Theresa Runstedtler argues that the NBA became an important pedagogical space where racial common sense not only was shaped and debated, but also came to inform wider assumptions about the appropriate policy solutions to the problems confronting Black urban communities.

The Humanities Forum presents Mejdulene B. Shomali, assistant professor, Department of Gender, Women's, + Sexuality Studies at UMBC, who will speak on Between Banat: Queer Arab Critique and Transnational Arab Archives, examining homoeroticism and nonnormative sexualities between Arab women in transnational Arab literature, art, and film.