Community Engagement

Election Day is Tuesday, Nov. 6. It’s a “blue moon” election, which means that every so often we have a midterm or off-year election with no statewide candidate for office at the top of the ticket. Typically, fewer people vote in midterm elections. Every election is important and this one is no different.

Fans of comic books, graphic novels, and manga gathered on June 15-17 at the Charlotte Convention Center for the annual Heroes Convention. In a “Monday Missive” blog posting, English Department Chair Mark West took a moment to discuss the use of sequential art to tell stories.

UNC Charlotte students in Karen Cox’s public history class learned about the magnitude of a historic schoolhouse’s place in history and its value to the local community. Through their hands-on research about the school, built in the early 1900s to educate African-American children, they are contributing to the planning process for the building’s potential preservation.

In a move designed to deepen and diversify its engagement in professional development for teachers, Charlotte Teachers Institute has formed a new educational partnership with Johnson C. Smith University to support classroom teachers in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools. Through CTI seminars led by UNC Charlotte and JCSU faculty, CMS teachers learn new content, work collaboratively with other teachers, and develop new curricula for their students.

For couples seeking to overcome infertility, the process can prove emotionally and financially daunting. At the same time, those who care about them can struggle to know how to show support. A new documentary created by graduate students in a visual ethnography class in UNC Charlotte’s Department of Communication Studies offers insights to the couples and their loved ones.

In the still early-morning hours of Monday, September 11, 2017, UNC Charlotte Air Force ROTC cadets took up their posts at UNC Charlotte’s 9/11 Memorial. Starting at midnight, the students took turns over a 24-hour period standing as silent sentinels in memory of those who had lost their lives in the deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil, commonly called 9/11.

Call him an earth sleuth. Wenwu Tang, assistant professor in the Department of Geography and Earth Sciences, scoops up information from a targeted locale and analyzes it for clues to address any number of societal problems with a spatial component. With his research, Tang looks at land use, land cover change, how traffic patterns may influence transportation, how pedestrians or animals may move in an area or even how disease may spread.

Located just outside Uptown Charlotte, near Wilkinson Boulevard and Tuckaseegee Road, is Camp Greene. Opened originally in September 1917, Camp Greene was named for the Revolutionary War hero Nathanael Greene. Associate Professor of History Heather Perry and her students are part of a University-community partnership to help history come alive.

For humanitarian contributions to the field of Industrial-Organizational Psychology, UNC Charlotte professor Steven Rogelberg has been named the inaugural recipient of the Society of Industrial and Organizational Psychology Humanitarian Award.

Social sustainability has been defined as creating places that promote well-being by understanding what people need from the places they live and work. UNC Charlotte continues to support this effort through the annual Integrated Network for Social Sustainability conference, scheduled for Monday, June 5, through Wednesday, June 7.