A group exhibition at Goucher College’s Silber Gallery, Hydroflow, is displaying the work of ten artists including UMBC visual arts faculty, Eric Dyer, Lisa Moren and Calla Thompson.

Hydroflow, centered upon works “that explore the multifaceted aspects of water,” opened April 9 and continues through May 19. A free artists’ reception will take place in the Silber, Friday, May 10 from 6 to 9 pm.

Learn more about Dyer, Moren and Thompsons’ works in the exhibition, at Goucher College’s community news publication In The Loop.

This month, the WAMU segment Art Beat with Lauren Landau, a daily update of arts and culture events in the D.C. area, highlighted the exhibition currently running in the Library Gallery, A New Context: Photographs from the Baltimore Sun Revisited.

Listen at WAMU’s website.

A New Context is on display through Friday, May 31.

Erickson Living has named Erickson School alumnus Christopher J. Emmett ’08, M.A. management, aging studies, regional vice president of operations. In his new leadership position, he will oversee the company’s campus operations in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Michigan and Kansas.

According to Senior Housing News.com:

“Emmett began his career with Erickson Living in 1996. He has held several management positions with the company, which reflect his superior leadership skills and expertise in healthcare and strategic management.

For the past eight years, he has served as the executive director at Highland Springs, in Dallas, Tex. Other career positions with Erickson Living include: senior administrator, administrator, and assistant administrator of the continuing care neighborhood at Oak Crest, in Parkville, Md; and, assistant administrator, assisted living administrator, special projects manager and health services business manager at Charlestown in Catonsville, Md.

Emmett holds a graduate degree in aging studies from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and an undergraduate degree in business from Towson University, Md. He is a licensed Maryland nursing home administrator and currently serves on the board of LeadingAge Texas.”

The Washington Blade today highlights a talk presented by Ann Christine Frankowski, associate research scientist and associate director of UMBC’s Center for Aging Studies, and Imani Woody, of Services and Advocacy for GLBT Elders (SAGE), on challenges facing older LGBT people.

Frankowski’s work examines autonomy, independence and freedom for older adults, with a focus on minorities, especially sexual minorities. The article notes:

An estimated 1.4 to 3.8 million LGBT people in the U.S. are over the age of 65 with the number expected to double by 2030. In pursuing her research, Frankowski found that “there is no discussion of sexuality, no talk about sex. People are treated asexually, and the question of sexual orientation is totally ignored.” In addition, [assisted living] staff members, with whom there is a high turnover rate, do not respect individual choices, and supervision of these staff members is inadequate. As a result, many LGBT older adults are forced to return to the closet to remain safe.

To learn more about this issue, read the full article in the Washington Blade.

Amy Bhatt, assistant professor of gender and women’s studies, was recently a guest on KUOW Seattle’s “Weekday with Steve Scher” program.

Bhatt discussed her new book, Roots and Reflections: South Asians in the Pacific Northwest, in which she and co-author Nalini Iyer draw on oral histories from the South Asian Oral History Project at the University of Washington Libraries, archival material, and popular culture representations to explore the various routes that brought South Asians to the Pacific Northwest, their motivations for leaving their homelands, and their experiences upon arrival.

“We’re interested in thinking about how we can use the stories of contemporary immigrants to shed light on older histories of migration, as well as thinking about contemporary debates about immigration more generally,” Bhatt said.

The interview can be heard here.

A segment of associate professor of history Kate Brown’s recent book, “Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters,” was reprinted on April 18 in the online magazine “Slate” under the headline “Life in a Real Nuclear Wasteland.”

“In pop culture, irradiated wastelands are fascinating… Part of the fantasy is surviving alone in an abandoned place no longer fit for the living, but the sad fact is that there are irradiated zones that are fully inhabited, and have been since the first years of the nuclear arms race,” Brown writes.  “No one has lived longer on contaminated terrain than people in the village of Muslumovo in the southern Russian Urals located downstream from the Maiak plutonium plant, built in 1948 to produce Soviet bomb cores.”

Brown goes on to describe the conditions in Muslumovo, which often afflicted children: “hydrocephalic children, children with cerebral palsy, missing kidneys, extra fingers, anemia, fatigue, and weak immune systems.”

“[Soviet doctors] determined that radioactive isotopes weaken immune systems and damage organ tissue and arteries, causing illnesses of the circulation and digestive tracts and making people susceptible to conventional diseases long before they succumb to radiation-related,” she writes.

The exhibition currently in the Library Gallery, A New Context: Photographs from the Baltimore Sun Revisited, was featured in a City Paper article today. The favorable review of show, curated from UMBC’s Baltimore Sun Archives, was written by Joe MacLeod.

In the piece, MacLeod explores the exhibition’s ability to highlight a transformation in the responsibility of photography in the news, and comments on how biases of the time, revealed in the edited photographs, influenced reporting. He says of the blatantly prejudiced cropping and its effect on the picture as a whole, “[c]ontext is all, and history changes context and what we decide an image means.”

Read “Fit to Print” at City Paper‘s website.

A New Context continues through Friday, May 31.

UMBC’s Center for Aging Studies has received a 17-month grant from the National Institute on Aging (NIA) to expand the research project “Autonomy in Assisted Living: A Cultural Analysis.” This grant extends a four-year ethnographic study of autonomy to include dementia care units affiliated with three of the sites in the parent grant. The Principal Investigators of this research are Professor Robert L. Rubinstein and Associate Research Scientist Ann Christine Frankowski. The research team includes ethnographer Amanda D. Peeples and GRA Colleen R. Bennett.

The UMBC Camerata’s performance last Sunday with the Handel Choir of Baltimore was mentioned yesterday in a Baltimore Sun article by Tim Smith, praising the career of Handel Choir director, Linda O’Neal.

The concert performed, Johannes Brahms’ Ein Deutsches Requiem, was considered by the Baltimore Sun arts critic, Tim Smith, one that “sounded smoothly balanced and articulated with admirable quality.”

Seth D. Messinger, associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, commented in today’s New York Times on the long-term process of recovering from limb loss, in the wake of Monday’s Boston Marathon bombings.

Messinger told Times reporter James Dao that training for athletics gives amputees a clear way of measuring recovery incrementally. “Rehab for traumatic limb loss is not a short thing, and patients want to know what they have to do next,” he said. “A sports model offers people a set of stages. You’ll walk between parallel bars, then walk with canes, then learn to run.”

He also cautioned, however, that a sports model of recovery is not comprehensive and it can fail to address issues like PTSD and anxieties about future employment.

In addition to his work at UMBC, Messinger is the director of qualitative research for the Center for Rehabilitation Sciences Research at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences.