an initiative at Virginia Tech
Veterans
in Society
We will encounter some of the literatures bearing on veteran-ness, exploring their contours, looking for hidden narratives as well as connections. We will also encounter narratives off the pages – in other media, in built environments, in our conversations with one another – and we should reflect on them. For the most part, our reflections will have a strongly American cast, but we encourage historical and international perspectives that will enrich our learning community, just as they might be useful in addressing opportunities and needs in diverse communities and larger polities.
Our approach involves engaging leading scholars, veterans, and practitioners who serve in conversation around ways that humanistic, artistic, and social science approaches to veterans in society can promote, deepen, and refine understanding across boundaries.
Moreover, to assure diversity of orientation and values, the organizers and our faculty include both veterans – officers and enlisted, with peacetime and wartime service – and civilian scholars representing several disciplines. As a result, institute participants from all backgrounds will be able to more fully understand the scholarly, social, and personal dimensions involved in the interactions of veterans in society, as well as the ways in which civilian society represents and interacts with veterans and their families.
Summer Scholars will use institute resources to develop or enhance their own projects applying institute themes in their research, teaching, and/or civic engagements. Collectively, we will build a core bibliography of veterans studies, topical annotated bibliographies bearing on individual research projects, and instructional modules in veterans studies, which will
all be made available to the public through this site.
The Veterans in Society: Ambiguities and Representations 2016 summer institute for college faculty is a project of
Virginia Tech's Center for the Study of Rhetoric in Society and the University Libraries.
The 2016 Veterans in Society summer institute has been made possible in part by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the human endeavor. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this the institute or this website, do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities nor Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.
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