The Teaching International program at Penn State Greater Allegheny will present a Canadian art workshop from noon to 1 p.m. Monday, Jan. 27, in Room 309 Ostermayer Laboratory in the Ostermayer Building.
Mary Collins will conduct the workshop. Collins earned a bachelor of fine arts degree from Carnegie Mellon University, where she studied under painter Sam Gilliam. Collins has taught art at the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts and the YMCA of Greater Pittsburgh. She has attended several prestigious art residencies, some of which were at the Yaddo Art Workshop and the Triangle Art Workshop, both in Hudson Valley, N.Y.
Teaching International will also present a film screening of "Hidden Pictures: A Personal Journey Into Global Mental Health" by Delaney Ruston, from 4 to 5 p.m. Monday, Jan. 27, in the Ostermayer Room in the Student Community Center. Through arresting images and poignant verite scenes, the film explores questions such as: How do families cope in countries where 80 percent of people with mental illness go without treatment? What happens when cultural framing of mental illness conflicts with potentially more effective treatments? And, how can a person be involuntary hospitalized with no right to appeal, as is the case in half the world?
Powerful narratives involving bipolar illness, depression, schizophrenia and anxiety show the universality of our seemingly different worlds.
From noon to 1 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 30, in the Ostermayer Room in the Student Community Center, Teaching International will feature speaker Bret Grote, who will discuss "Solitary Confinement and Mass Incarceration: The Public Health Consequences of the Prison State."
With more than 2.4 million people in U.S. jails and prisons, more than 7 million in prison or on probation or parole, and more than 80,000 in solitary confinement, the prison state has profound and often invisible public health consequences. This talk will explore the scope of mass incarceration from an international human rights framework, focusing on the growth of solitary confinement and its abuse in Pennsylvania, and the public health consequences posed by these related phenomena, both of which threaten people who experience them with social, psychological and legal disabilities that may last a lifetime.
Grote is an attorney with the Abolitionist Law Center, a public interest law firm dedicated to abolishing race- and class-based mass incarceration. He graduated from Pitt Law School and was recognized as the school’s Distinguished Public Interest Scholar in 2013.
The Teaching International program at Penn State Greater Allegheny has been in place since 2004. Its goal is to educate students about world trends by studying different regions and issues of global importance. This year's focus is on Canada and global health.