The third annual UTMB Center for Violence Prevention symposium will explore the unique power of science, art, and the humanities to reimagine social change. Join us in Galveston, Texas, on April 28th for an Ideas Symposium: Examining Social Issues through the Sciences, Arts, and Humanities, which continues our theme of studying violence prevention through the lens of race/ethnicity, class, citizenship, identity, and gender. We will discuss how debates ranging from gun and domestic violence to employment and reproductive rights are often inspired by the arts and how artists draw inspiration from the social sciences and humanities. This interdisciplinary symposium will feature nationally recognized scholars, policymakers, artists, and musicians who will come together to challenge traditionally held beliefs about violence & inspire creative avenues for advocacy. 

• Register here: bit.ly/3omkfdp

Pre-Symposium ‘Presenting Evidence to Policymakers’ Training

The training will be led by Lauren Sheer, Vice President of Health Policy and Legislative Affairs, UTMB and Shannon Guillot-Wright, PhD, Vice Chair of Research and Health Policy, UTMB Dept of Family Medicine. To register for the training and to order boxed lunches, please visit here.

Event sponsored by the Scholars Strategy Network

    Keynote Speaker: Rose Jolly, PhD

Rose Jolly was born in South Africa and left for Canada in 1981 due to the apartheid regime of the time. She came to Penn State in 2013.  Her overarching interest is in the ways in which representations of violence and reconciliation actually affect inter-governmental, inter-community and inter-personal relations in contexts of conflict. Her work explores the links between living conditions of extreme deprivation, gender-based violence and coercion, and the HIV pandemic. She has worked with victim-survivors of state sponsored torture, gender-based violence, and communities fractured by illness globally. She explores the ethics of working with highly vulnerable communities in research and development. 

She has published in the fields of South African literature and culture, postcolonial theory, and the critical medical humanities.  Her work has involved mixed quantitative and qualitative methodologies.  She is particularly experienced in qualitative analysis of oral testimony and tools of qualitative research that involve embodied gesture in addition to conventional verbalization. Students interested in the nexus of gender, race and state-sponsored aggression in contexts of colonization and related structural, violence, and the rhetoric of attempts at intergenerational peace-building in the wake of such violence, are welcome to contact her about their work.

    Filmmaker: Sally Rubin, MA

Sally Rubin is a documentary filmmaker, editor, and professor who has worked in the field for over twenty years. She recently completed a documentary about stereotypes of Appalachia and their impact on our last presidential election, entitled hillbilly. The film is in distribution through the Orchard (Cartel Land, Life Animated) funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts, recently won the Jury Prize for Best Documentary at the Los Angeles Film Festival and has been praised by Michael Moore and Dolly Parton. In 2014 Rubin completed Life on the Line (with Jen Gilomen) about a teenage girl growing up on the U.S./Mexico border. The film broadcast nationally on PBS and premiered at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival. Rubin's previous film, Deep Down was an ITVS-funded feature-length documentary about two friends in eastern Kentucky who find themselves divided over mountaintop removal coal mining near their homes. The film was part of the 2010-2011 Independent Lens Emmy-winning PBS series, and has reached almost 1.5 million people through its broadcast, distribution, and outreach campaign. It was nominated for an Emmy for its Virtual Mine outreach project, in the category of New Approaches to News and Documentary. It was funded by Chicken and Egg Pictures, the MacArthur Foundation, ITVS, and the Fledgling Fund. 

Rubin is a full-time documentary professor at Chapman University. After earning her M.A. in Documentary Film and Video from Stanford University, Rubin fell deeply in love with the field of documentary film, where she hopes to continue working for a very long time.

    Singer-Songwriter: Waylon Payne

Magic happens when everything comes together like it’s supposed to — when the joys and the pain, the triumphs and the missteps all click into place to be seen for what they truly are. Waylon Payne’s Blue Eyes, The Harlot, The Queer, The Pusher & Me Is such a moment, the culmination of an extraordinary journey set to music. A son of country music royalty, a teenaged Baptist preacher turned addict and actor, Payne sings about fathers and sons, faith and addiction, recovery and renewal with devastating clarity. His character-rich collection harks back to a way of telling stories in song that revealed kept secrets and promised mystery. Over his years, Payne has felt the terrible power secrets can hold and learned the transformative value of releasing them. Finally, he’s in a place where he can harness that power to create transcendent work. 

Payne released his first album in 2003 and launched an acting career that included portraying Jerry Lee Lewis in the 2005 Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line and Nashville guitar legend Hank Garland in 2008’s Crazy. At the same time his career seemed to be coming together, though, a drug problem that had started in his teens was developing to a full-blown meth addiction that was ripping Payne’s life apart. Now eight years clean, Payne finally can put all the elements of his life in their proper place. Blue Eyes, The Harlot, The Queer, The Pusher & Me testifies to a decade-long journey, capturing songs and moments from his most troubled time, as well as the grace and the relationships that led him out of it.