Nerd Nite Back to School Special

Maybe you're headed back to school, maybe you're not. But join us anyway for a fun line-up of speakers along with our usual food and booze!

We're happy to introduce Bill Warters as a speaker. He'll be presenting a talk called "Working with and Learning From Conflict: Tales from the Field". Bill has been studying and intervening in and teaching about conflict all his adult life. In this presentation he will share a few illustrative and sometimes humorous stories from the field. Along the way we’ll review some key concepts related to conflict, community-building and the development of local cultures of dispute resolution. Bill will draw on his social ecology and urban ethnography and symbolic interactionist training to Nerd things up a bit.

Our second presenter is Cranbrook geologist John Zawiskie who will take us for an exploration of the major types of meteorites, what they tell us about the early history and origin of the solar system, and some effects of asteroid impacts on the Earth. Meteorites and impact glass from the Cranbrook Institute of Science collections will be on display and available for direct examination. An engaging activity meteorite or meteorwrong will allow us “nerds” to take a hand at identifying meteorites from unknown samples before and after the presentation.

Our final talk will be "Labor in Detroit: From The Battle of the Overpass to Bankruptcy" with Meghan Courtney. Meghan is the AFSCME Archivist at Wayne State's Walter P. Reuther Library. Before moving to Detroit, she worked to organize hotel workers in Chicago. She likes exploring the intersections of gender and labor in U.S. history and riding bikes. Detroit has always been a working-class town, but it became a seat of the labor movement during the height of U. S. auto manufacturing. Like the rest of the country, Detroit has seen jobs shift away from manufacturing and toward service work. This talk will show the path from the heady days of sit-down strikes to labor's place in the largest municipal bankruptcy case and beyond.

It's going to be a great time! Join us! And don't forget to bring some school supplies to donate to a local elementary school!

Get your tickets online here. (https://www.eventbrite.com/e/nerd-nite-back-to-school-special-tickets-12945848381)