Session Title: There is More Than Meets the Eye: How Knowledge Shapes Perception and Memory, and Why This Matters for Older Adults

Date: Thursday, March 24
Time: 5 p.m.
Location: Hester Auditorium
Presenter: Kimberly Newberry

Some cognitive functions, like perception and memory, naturally worsen with age. During this session, Dr. Kimberly Newberry will discuss the influence of prior knowledge and experience on perception and memory, and how these effects may be used to attenuate cognitive deficits in older adults.

Dr. Newberry joined the psychology department in 2020 after completing her Ph.D. in cognitive psychology at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas. Her research interests broadly include event perception, comprehension and aging. More specifically, her scholarship focuses on how knowledge influences perception and memory for everyday activities, and how these processes change with age. Her recent publication, “Influences of Domain Knowledge on Segmentation and Memory,” (Memory & Cognition, 2021) investigated how expertise influences the events people perceive and their memory for specific activities, including basketball and a video game. Newberry is currently collaborating with colleagues at Kansas State University on a chapter focusing on how semantic knowledge influences older adults' perception and memory for everyday events.

Session Title: The Global War on Terror and Mass Surveillance: Racializing Muslims in the Name of Security

Date: Tuesday, March 8
Time: 7 p.m.
Location: Hester Auditorium
Presenter: Saher Selod, Ph.D., Simmons University

Saher Selod is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology at Simmons University. She joined the Department of Sociology in 2012 after completing her PhD at Loyola University Chicago. Her research interests are in race and ethnicity, gender, religion and surveillance. Her scholarship examines how Muslim Americans experience racialization in the United States. Her book Forever Suspect: Racialized Surveillance of Muslim Americans in the War on Terror (Rutgers University Press 2018) examines how Muslim men and Muslim women experience gendered forms of racialization through their surveillance by the state and by private citizens. She is currently writing a book with colleagues on the Global Racialization of Muslims, which is under contract at Polity Press. She is also collaborating on a second project that looks at surveillance, policing and political participation of Muslims in the United States that includes the experiences of African American and Black immigrant Muslims. Dr. Selod serves on the Editorial Boards of Ethnic and Racial Studies and Critical Sociology. She is a member of the Scholars Strategy Network and is a Faculty Affiliate for the Center for Security, Race and Rights at Rutgers University.