Ithaca College

Patricia Zimmermann, professor of screen studies and codirector of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival, delivered the keynote address for the Media, Communications, Film, and Liberal Arts Consortium (MCFLAC) Annual Symposium, held this year at Colby College, on May 23, 2017.

The theme of this year's symposium was "Revolution." Her keynote was entitled "Eleven Theses on Communications and the Revolution in Academic Affairs."

Zimmermann also served as a respondent for the panel "Encounters with Otherness as Revolutionary Praxis," with presentations by William Brown (University of Roehampton), Matthew Holtmeier (Ithaca College), and Andrew Utterson (Ithaca College).  In addition, she moderated the closing symposium discussion and wrap-up with all participants.

MCFLAC Symposium 2: Revolutions was the second-annual two-day symposium devoted to media, communication, and film studies programs housed at small liberal arts colleges.  The symposium brought together faculty teaching at four-year liberal arts and comprehensive colleges for two days of resource sharing, workshops, curricular benchmarking, and panel sessions.

This year’s gathering addressed challenges faced within an increasingly polarized country where the inherent value of the liberal arts is no longer a given, but rather, an enterprise now requiring defense. MCFLAC creates connections between and among all-too-often-siloed disciplines and institutions through shared commitment to communications and liberal arts.