Browsing by Author "Forte, Joseph A."

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    Jeans Noticeably Absent: The Story of Denim Day 1979
    (Virginia Tech, 2019-04-05)
    This stage production included readings of contemporaneous newspaper articles about Denim Day in 1979 and clips from the Denim Day 40th Anniversary Oral History Collection. It features stories from some of the original members of the Gay Student Alliance who were involved in planning the first Gay Awareness Week at Virginia Tech, which included Denim Day.
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    Lighting Rounds & Expo: OER, Pedagogy, and Tools
    Kinnaman, Alex; Becksford, Lisa; Dean, Kirsten; Napier, Mike; Forte, Joseph A.; Mease, Sarah; Walz, Anita R. (Virginia Tech. University Libraries, 2020-03-03)
    Join us to learn about OER affordances, tools, support and applications! This session will include brief lightning talks to provide an overview of these open education topics as well as hands-on time for attendees to ask questions about some current and recent open education projects at Virginia Tech, the pedagogical implications of open educational resources, and support that is available for instructors and learners who would like to share or create open educational resources. Topics include: open publishing, Creative Commons licensing, open source virtual reality, Omeka, the Open Textbook Library, and more.
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    "We Weren't Kidding": Prediction as Ideology in American Pulp Science Fiction, 1938-1949
    Forte, Joseph A. (Virginia Tech, 2010-05-03)
    In 1971, Isaac Asimov observed in humanity, a science-important society. For this he credited the man who had been his editor in the 1940s during the period known as the golden age of American science fiction, John W. Campbell, Jr. Campbell was editor of Astounding Science-Fiction, the magazine that launched both Asimov's career and the golden age, from 1938 until his death in 1971. Campbell and his authors set the foundation for the modern sci-fi, cementing genre distinction by the application of plausible technological speculation. Campbell assumed the science-important society that Asimov found thirty years later, attributing sci-fi ascendance during the golden age a particular compatibility with that cultural context. On another level, sci-fi's compatibility with "science-important" tendencies during the first half of the twentieth-century betrayed a deeper agreement with the social structures that fueled those tendencies and reflected an explication of modernity on capitalist terms. Tethered to an imperative of plausibly extrapolated technology within an American context, sci-fi authors retained the social underpinnings of that context. In this thesis, I perform a textual analysis of stories published in Astounding during the 1940s, following the sci-fi as it grew into a mainstream cultural product. In this, I prioritize not the intentions of authors to advance explicit themes or speculations. Rather, I allow the authors' direction of reader sympathy to suggest the way that favored characterizations advanced ideological bias. Sci-fi authors supported a route to success via individualistic, competitive, and private enterprise. They supported an American capitalistic conveyance of modernity.