Passion Project Showcase: Big Bend Community College

Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it. ― Mary Oliver Okinawa, Japan is where I call home. I was born in the pottery district of the capital city, Naha, on that tropical island until I left at 18.  My mother was Okinawan and my father was from West Virginia.  The benefit of two cultures has left me enriched with the qualities of both.  Although my art training is in the classical western tradition, my aesthetics have always been eastern. I married young and raised a family before I went to school and trained to be an artist. I always knew I would train in art and had no desire for anything else. I started school at Bakersfield College and went on to receive my Bachelor’s degree in art at California State University, Bakersfield.  From there I continued at New Mexico State University to receive my Master of Fine Arts in painting and drawing.  I taught in the Las Cruces, New Mexico and El Paso, Texas area prior to my moving to teach at Big Bend Community College.  While in Las Cruces, I also worked at the University Art Gallery and Kent Museum as curator/registrar/collections person- basically, whatever needed doing. I have taught at Big Bend since 1998 and have enjoyed the relative quiet of the area.  There are few distractions and I can focus on my own work (in my infrequent spare time).  The students are eager for the most part and want to do well. According to my DNA results, I am related to the people who made the terra cotta warriors in China. My husband is a ceramics artist and teaches at Big Bend.  It is great to have a colleague and friend all in the family. He is my best supporter. I guess it was all in my DNA and birthplace to be with a ceramics person. See video, slideshow, and one line selfie art here: Rie Palkovic, Art Instructor.  

What is the Passion Project Showcase?  Big Bend started a quarterly event in Winter 2021 to feature the works of wonder that inspire members of our school community.  Why have a Passion Project Showcase?  At Big Bend, we are fortunate enough to be surrounded by talented and awesome people. Our school is full of faculty, administrators, staff, and students who are experts in a wide variety of areas. Their work is driven by excitement and curiosity, and we want to celebrate these love labors. Passion Project Showcase II features Dr. Dennis Knepp, Philosophy/Religious Studies Faculty. 

Dr. Jim Hamm has been teaching at Big Bend since 1993. In that time he has primarily taught physics, astronomy, and science courses, although he has at one time or another taught almost every mathematics course from pre-algebra through differential equations. The only math courses he has missed are statistics, first-quarter calculus, and linear algebra. Before Jim came to Big Bend he taught for a couple of years part-time at Edmonds Community College and North Seattle Community. To make ends meet during those years he also drove for Shuttle Express, an airport shuttle service. Prior to that he taught at Eastern Oregon State College for two years, and before that he was in graduate school at the University of Minnesota, graduating with a Ph.D. in Physics. More: https://libguides.bigbend.edu/Jim_Hamm_Physics_Instructor Constellations and Stars eBook:  https://www.canva.com/design/DAEdwSanGnk/view

Passion Project Showcase: Dr. Allison Palumbo Discusses Book: Love and the Fighting Female: A Critical Study of Onscreen Depictions Dr. Allison P. Palumbo is a tenured English faculty member at Big Bend Community College in Moses Lake, WA. They have a Ph.D. in English from the University of Kentucky and a long list of literary loves. Dr. P’s research and teaching emphasize gender issues in American literature and popular culture. In addition to their work on the sexual politics of romance as portrayed onscreen, they have published articles on Henry Miller’s Tropics trilogy. Beyond their passion for guessing entire movie plot lines in the first five minutes, they love to read heavy books on hot beaches, indulge in good food, and take road trips. "The fighting female archetype—a self-reliant woman of great physical prowess—has become increasingly common in action films and on television. However, the progressive female identities of these narratives cannot always resist the persistent and problematic framing of male-female relationships as a battle of the sexes or other source of antagonism. Combining cultural analysis with close readings of key popular American film and television texts since the 1980s, this study argues that certain fighting female themes question regressive conventions in male-female relationships. Those themes reveal potentially progressive ideologies regarding female agency in mass culture that reassure audiences of the desirability of empowered women while also imagining egalitarian intimacies that further empower women. Overall, the fighting female narratives addressed here afford contradictory viewing pleasures that reveal both new expectations for and remaining anxieties about the “strong, independent woman” ideal that emerged in American popular culture post-feminism."