KUT & KUTX Studios -- Podcasts
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This year we kicked off the Texas Museum Map, exploring and highlighting museums big and small, traditional and weird.
Today we’ll take a tour of the state, with stops at the Museum of South Texas History in Edinburg, the Rangerette Showcase & Museum in East Texas, and Cadillac Ranch near Amarillo, among others.
Join KUT’s Rebecca McInroy along with Annette Juba from AGE of Central Texas, Dr. Valerie Rosen, and Ray Williams and Monique O’Neil from The Blanton Museum to talk about how the Blanton is partnering with schools, hospitals, and other organizations to create groundbreaking programs that help patients, families, and caregivers navigate social, reparative experiences.
Monique Piñon O’Neil
Museum Educator, Family, and Community Programs O’Neil is an artist and educator with a master’s degree in clinical art therapy. At the Blanton, Monique’s work focuses on encouraging intergenerational dialogue and shared studio projects. She develops collaborations with a diverse array of community-based organizations, ensuring access to museum resources across the social-economic spectrum. These collaborations include focused, ongoing work with groups including homeless artists, at-risk youth, veterans, aging adults, and Hispanic families.
Annette Gracy Juba, LCSW
Juba is a native Austinite and clinical social worker received a Master of Science degree in Social Work from the University of Texas. She has worked with older adults since 1986, when she took a part-time job in a nursing home, only, she thought, until she “found something better.” In 30+ years of searching, she has facilitated caregiver support groups; worked with dementia respite programs; co-directed a cognitive intervention program for people with early memory loss; and presented about aging, social work, and memory loss at the local, state, and national level. She is a past co-chair of the Aging Services Council. She currently serves on the advisory panel for the Center for Excellence in Aging Services and Long Term Care at the UT School of Nursing and as Vice-Chair of the OneStar National Service Commission. Since 2010, Annette has worked as the Deputy Director for AGE of Central Texas, where she oversees the agency’s six programs of direct service.
Dr. Valerie Rosen
Dr. Rosen received her undergraduate degrees in Business Administration and Psychology from U.T. Austin. She received her medical degree from The University of Texas Medical School at Houston and completed a Psychiatry Residency at Yale School of Medicine. Dr. Rosen held a Clinical Assistant Professorship at Yale and worked as an attending psychiatrist at Yale University Health Services for ten years. She came back home to Texas and joined Seton in 2013. Her predominant area of expertise is PTSD and trauma; she is a Regional Trainer for Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT), an evidence-based treatment for PTSD. For the past 15 years, she has trained and supervised staff and residents in CPT. She also specializes in psychotherapy and medication management for college, graduate, and professional school students and is actively engaged in ways to improve treatment and access to psychiatric care for veterans and active military and in educating providers in military culture. In her role as Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at UT Dell-Seton, she enjoys teaching and supervising residents and medical students, sees patients for psychotherapy and medication management, is involved in clinical research, and is the developer and Medical Director for the Restore and Veteran Restore Programs, intensive outpatient programs for trauma that utilize CPT as their core modality.
Ray Williams, MA, EdM
Williams has been the Director of Education and Academic Affairs at the Blanton Museum of Art, the University of Texas at Austin since 2012. For more than a decade, much of his teaching in museums has been designed to meet the needs of health care professionals. For UT’s new Dell Medical School, Ray provides three workshops for first-year medical students designed to build skills in observation, empathic communication, and resilience. He also works with residents, attendings and nurses in Family Medicine, Women’s Health, Psychiatry, and Palliative Care. During his four years at the Harvard Art Museums, Ray worked with interprofessional teams from Brigham and Women’s Hospital on a regular basis, as well as young adults with cancer through a program at Dana Farber Cancer Center. He has a particular interest in palliative care and mindfulness practices, developed through work with hospice professionals and chaplains. For the past two years, in partnership with psychiatrist Dr. Valerie Rosen who leads an intensive out-patient program for trauma survivors, Ray has designed museum experiences that support skills being learned in cognitive process/behavioral therapy.
Join KUT’s Rebecca McInroy along with museum educator Sabrina Phillips of The Blanton, Social Studies Teacher at LBJ Highschool Andrea Gaines, Jessica Jolliffe of AISD, and Jullian Bontke from the Anti-Defamation League, to talk about how kids are learning new ways to discuss issues like immigration, bias, economic inequality, and more, through art.
How can art and museums provide space and time for feelings and experiences we have trouble articulating? How are parents, educators, museums, and school systems working together to cultivate more empathetic and engaged students?
You might think that cell phones make everything worse. We can’t remember phone numbers anymore, we are addicted to checking texts and emails, and we end up taking thousands of crappy pictures each month. What good can ever come of this?
As Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke discuss in this episode of Two Guys on Your Head, it’s not all bad. We may actually be remembering more moments because of the photos we’re taking and the way we’re engaging with the world through our phones. But then again, there is more to any story, and the jury is still out on this one.
This month on In Perspective, our roundtable participants discuss public memory in relation to grief, war, and memorials such as the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. Two of our guests represent that museum, which commemorates the September 11 attacks of 2001 and the World Trade Center bombing of 1993. Also joining us are two distinguished faculty from The University of Texas at Austin and by a call-in guest who is an assistant professor and filmmaker from Northwestern University.
The Discussion
Kyle Henry, MFA, is an assistant professor at Northwestern University. He is the editor of Heather Courtney’s 2012 film, Where Soldiers Come From, among many others. His latest documentary project, Half-Life of War (2014), explores war memorials and asks the question: Do we memorialize wars to remember, or do we construct monuments and memorials so that we can forget? In this discussion, Henry describes how he works to distill emotional realities through filmmaking in order to get at larger truths.
Clifford Chanin, director of education at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, discusses the significance of technology to how September 11th was experienced and how it is remembered in the museum. He addresses the question of whether or not memorials have particular life spans, and explains the dramatic change in the nature of memorials over the past several decades.
Jenny Pachucki, oral historian and assistant curator at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, shares what it means to speak about tragic events and the value of listening to each other’s recollections of where they were during historical moments. She explains that the exhibits bring together a vast array of remembrances and celebrate the victims’ lives, rather than attend only to their tragic passing.
Richard Flores, Ph.D., is a professor of anthropology and Mexican American studies at The University of Texas at Austin. He has written extensively on the topic of public memory, particularly in relation to Texas history and the Alamo. He helps frame the discussion of public memory and history with reference to the particular purposes served by myth-making and memorials. He explains how the distillation of events and lives toward the symbolic might also silence the voices of veterans and gloss over ongoing conflicts.
Tom Palaima, Ph.D., joins us from the department of classics at The University of Texas at Austin. He is a MacArthur fellow who focuses on Aegean prehistory and early Greek language and culture. He offers examples from Greek antiquity to give context to the discussion of early war memorials in the form of songs and epics. Palaima categorizes memorials as one of two varieties: those created to benefit those affected by the war, such as veterans and their families; and those created to benefit the state and national identity.
What’s your perspective?
These In Perspective participants together question how we deal with the trauma of terrorism and war, how we might mourn collectively, and why we build public memorials. They seek to understand and to teach an understanding of public memory and the human costs of war. At the Texas Humanities Project, we hope that this engagement with war and public memory from a variety of points of view in the humanities will spark thoughtful discussion among listeners about the impacts of memory and memorials in your lives.
Check back this time next month for our third In Perspective roundtable.