Profs and Pints - Richmond

Profs and Pints Richmond presents: “Encountering Cryptids,” on the cultural, historical and psychological significance of beings that may exist only in lore, with Joshua Barton, lecturer in English at Virginia Commonwealth University and scholar of horror.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/richmond-cryptids .]

Some started out as anecdotes shared by explorers. Others were created as cautionary tales, or literally were just developed as spooky stories for kids. Regardless of their origins, they’re now entrenched inhabitants of our nation’s landscapes, their lives perpetuated through tales told by communities that believe they’re real.

They’re cryptids with names like Sasquatch, Mothman, the Jersey Devil, Ogopogo, the Flatwoods Monster, and the Beast of Bray Road. And your single best chance to get to know them might be by coming to this talk by Joshua Barton, a scholar of horror who has earned a loyal following among Profs and Pints fans with incredibly entertaining past talks on folklore and horror.

He'll look at the genesis of the tales themselves and what they tell us about historic approaches to the unknown. He’ll discuss how tales of cryptids reflect societal fears, inspire local legends, and connect communities through shared myths, and he’ll examine the impact of cryptid tales on modern storytelling and local tourism.

Turning his attention to specific cryptids, Barton will describe how the Jersey Devil speaks to our nation’s puritan roots and our collective fear of evil. The chupacabra reflects anxieties over the blending of cultures, while Bigfoot and Mothman stand out as huge generators of tourism revenue.

You’ll learn how the study of such creatures—cryptozoology—exists at the intersection of oral folklore and modern belief, and you’ll probably emerge from the talk eager to tell cryptid tales of your own. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: An 1889 Garrick Mallery sketch of a painted rock encountered on the Tule River Reservation in California. Cryptozoologists have interpreted the three figures painted on it, generally regarded as Native American symbols for negation, as instead representing an entire Sasquatch family.

Profs and Pints Richmond presents: “Social Media to Social Reckoning,” a talk about how Big Tech social media platforms operate and affect our world, with Caddie Alford, leading digital rhetoric scholar, associate professor of rhetoric, and co-lead of the AI Futures Hub at Virginia Commonwealth University.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/richmond-social-reckoning .]

Learn what social media platforms attempt to get us to think and feel, and assess the impact that their algorithms are having on our social lives and democracy, with Caddie Alford, a scholar of persuasion vis-à-vis Big Tech’s power.

Applying the ancient art of rhetoric to social media platforms and what’s billed as “artificial intelligence,” she’ll offer insights on the beliefs held by AI company CEOs and on the changes that Elon Musk made to Twitter. She’ll discuss concepts like cyberlibertarianism, technofascism, and “data trauma,” and she’ll call attention to the relationship between how we talk about social media and how we use it. If you started out “surfing the web” but now find yourself “doomscrolling,” her talk will help you understand why.

Dr. Alford will shed light on the discrepancies between how Big Tech social media companies portray themselves and how they actually operate. No matter how much they characterize social media platforms as “ecosystems,” the platforms’ true purpose is harvesting our data for shareholder value.

We’ll look at how the story of AI is deeply intertwined with the story of the internet, and how the political agendas of Big Tech social media companies are actualized by the material realities of computing infrastructure, contingent labor, and other considerations.

We’ll close by discussing how social media users are pushing back at Big Tech and its justifications for its policies and agendas. ( Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image from Pixabay.

Profs and Pints Richmond presents: “Fighting Words, Civil War,” on the fiery debates about free speech, political violence, and slavery that led to armed conflict between the Union and the Confederacy, with Paul Quigley, professor of Civil War History at Virginia Tech and director of the Virginia Center for Civil War Studies.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/richmond-fighting-words .]

Just like in our own time, the years leading up to our nation’s Civil War found Americans wrestling with thorny questions related to free speech. Among the questions being asked: Who got to say what to whom? Which words were so incendiary as to justify physical reprisal?

These questions became more urgent than ever in 1856, when South Carolina congressman Preston Brooks used a cane to beat Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner unconscious in the Senate chamber in retaliation for Sumner’s Senate speech denouncing slavery and personally insulting Brooks’s relative. Although the caning lasted barely a minute, it greatly intensified the fight over slavery that ultimately led to the Civil War.

Professor Paul Quigley examined that notorious incident, its impact, and its relevance to today in depth for his book The Man Behind the Cane: Preston Brooks, Political Violence, and the Road to the Civil War. He’ll connect the caning to wider struggles over free speech, violence, and slavery in a talk that will deepen your understanding of our nation’s history and deepest divisions.

He’ll describe how proslavery Americans, realizing that antislavery talk could spark slave uprisings, censored abolitionism by any means necessary, burning abolitionist pamphlets and carrying out the 1837 murder of newspaper editor Elijah Lovejoy.

Undeterred, abolitionists embraced the power of provocative language as they repeatedly exposed slaveholder brutality and the injustice of enslavement. Their heated rhetoric fueled increasing acceptance of antislavery violence, culminating in John Brown’s 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry.

The spiral of rhetorical and physical violence escalated the conflict until it erupted in secession and a war that we’ve never completely put in our past. Could today’s political tensions lead to a similar outcome? (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: From a reproduction of a famous John L. Magee cartoon depicting Preston Brooks caning Charles Sumner.

Profs and Pints Richmond presents: “Doom and Dinosaurs,” a look at how mass extinctions shaped the dinosaurs and what research on these events tells us about Earth life’s long-term prospects, with Ian Wilenzik, paleontologist and visiting assistant professor of biology at George Washington University.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees, available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/richmond-doom-dinosaurs .]

Pity the poor dinosaurs. They lacked both scientific research to help deal with potential environmental catastrophes and places where they could have a beer and discuss it.

You, on the other hand, have the opportunity to come to Profs and Pints to hear a fascinating talk on the impact of mass extinctions on dinosaur evolution and what research on dinosaurs tells us about biodiversity and Earth’s current biodiversity crisis.

Dr. Ian Wilenzik, who has studied and taught courses on dinosaur evolution, population spread, and extinction, will leave you with a greater appreciation of the resilience of life on earth and how we’re both the product and source of biologically catastrophic events.

Many of us are familiar with how a big meteor impact about 66 million years ago wiped out the Earth’s dinosaur population, leaving us only with their feathered descendants, birds. Less well known is how the Earth actually has undergone five periods of mass extinction that wiped out nearly all life, and how dinosaurs arose from one and endured another—both caused by volcanic activity—before meeting their match in the third.

To ground his discussion, Dr. Wilenzik will talk about how we study mass extinctions by looking for geologic evidence of volcanic activity, meteoric blasts, and other catastrophic activity and of gaps in the fossil record after them.

He’ll also discuss what makes a dinosaur a dinosaur, describing their distinct anatomical features. He’ll talk about how they and other forms of life evolved over long periods of time and were affected by extinction events.

We’ll look at how the meteor-caused mass extinction that wiped out dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous paved the way for the rise of mammals and the emergence of primates, and, eventually, us. Looking ahead to future mass extinctions and what might survive them, we’ll talk about how that plant you forget to water might have the last laugh, as well as why crocodiles might be around a while. ( Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: A Triceratops mounted skeleton at the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History (Photo by Allie Caulfield / Wikimedia Commons).