Photo Spotlights

Adam Walker, a master’s student in public policy, is traveling to Kenya in December to assist in the development of sustainable irrigation technologies for use by local farmers. The project is being conducted by the international nonprofit KickStart International. Walker plans on blogging about his experiences at forthebottom4.wordpress.com.

Holiday shoppers are buying up handmade gifts at the annual School for American Crafts holiday sale. Student artists in the school’s glass, wood, ceramics and metals programs are selling their wares in the lobby of the Student Alumni Union. The sale runs from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., Dec. 15 and 16. Students use the money to defray the cost of projects throughout the school year. Here, Belinda Bryce, director for the Arthur O. Eve Higher Education Opportunity Program, gathers pottery to purchase.

Holiday shoppers are buying up handmade gifts at the annual School for American Crafts holiday sale. Student artists in the school’s glass, wood, ceramics and metals programs are selling their wares in the lobby of the Student Alumni Union. The sale runs until 6 p.m. Dec. 16. Students use the money to defray the cost of projects throughout the school year.

Kindergartners at RIT’s Margaret’s House do their part to collect spare change during The Salvation Army’s annual Red Kettle Campaign. The class, led by teacher Susan Northrup, set up shop Dec. 8 in front of the Campus Center.

Brick City Catering created flavored cupcakes for the holidays. The cupcakes are available for purchase by the half dozen and come in three flavors—Chocolate Peppermint (chocolate cake with peppermint extract, chocolate butter cream frosting, and candy cane garnish), Gingerbread (spiced yellow cake with cream cheese frosting and cinnamon candies), and Snow White (white cake with coconut butter cream frosting and coconut flakes). Orders may be placed through the catering sales office at 475-2346 by Dec. 20.

Noted poet and playwright Amiri Baraka will present a master class on the craft of creative writing and be present at an RIT performance of his award-winning play Dutchman on Dec. 13. The master class will be held from 4 to 6 p.m. in the 1510 Lab Theater in Lyndon B. Johnson Hall at RIT’s National Technical Institute for the Deaf. The play will be performed at 7:30 p.m.

The Metals Alumni Exhibition showcases national and international artists who have graduated from the RIT program and have achieved recognition and success for their work. An opening reception in RIT’s Bevier Gallery was held Dec. 10 and the show runs through Jan. 19. Bevier Gallery is closed Dec. 18 to Jan. 2.

RIT students rehearsing for this year’s performances of The Vagina Monologues took time to support University of Hartford student Ally Pfeiffer, a target of cyberbullies, who told her story on NBC’s Today Dec. 8. The RIT students created cards and wrote letters and plan to send them to Pfeiffer in Connecticut. The effort was coordinated by RIT’s Center for Women and Gender.

Approximately 30 vendors participated in the annual Winter Craft Sale, offering a variety of items created by faculty, staff and alumni. Ashley Tyler, a fifth-year mechanical engineering student, shopped at Jesarah Jewelry Designs for a gift for her mother.

Joshua Benton, director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard, was among the featured speakers at the RIT Social Media and Communication Symposium on Dec. 8. He also delivered the School of Print Media’s Paul and Louise Miller Lecture about the future of journalism. Benton said that as someone who grew up in a poor town in South Louisiana, his sources for news were a small, daily newspaper and Dan Rather. Benton believes journalism is better than it was in the past and the ability for everyone to publish on the Internet is an amazing innovation. Benton says that traditional news organizations have been wary of aggregation, but journalists have been active aggregators for years as they are the ones who are “aggregating” the brains of their sources for stories. Before coming to Harvard, Benton was an award-winning education reporter at The Dallas Morning News.

Students react to a reading during the Poetry Slam Dec. 3 in Java Wally’s, a coffee shop in Wallace Center.

Industry professionals discussed the use of social media in marketing and advertising during RIT’s Social Media and Communication Symposium Dec. 8. Keynote speakers included Jeff Jarvis, associate professor of journalism at the City University of New York and founding editor of Entertainment Weekly.