In the Loop: The HDO Blog
HDO: The Human Experience
October 26, 2020
Miles Husid
Marketing Coordinator, HDO
Not only are HDO’s Master’s degree courses led by top faculty at UT Austin, they also feature some of the best and brightest students on The Forty Acres. Year after year, we continue to be grateful for how much we learn from our incredible students. Seven years in, I guess we should no longer be surprised.
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Reimagining the Humanities for the 21st Century
October 21, 2020
Steven Mintz, Ph.D.
Professor of History at UT Austin
As humanists grow ever more desperate for students, funding and public recognition, these scholars have attached the “humanities” label to an ever-expanding list of popular subjects — not just such old mainstays such as the legal humanities, the medical humanities or the public humanities, but to a host of less familiar areas of study, including the environmental humanities or the urban humanities and, of course, the digital humanities and the global humanities, each supported by a network of scholarly journals, book series and conferences.
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So, You Want to Change the World?
September 25, 2020
Dr. S. Scott Graham
Assistant Professor in the Department of Rhetoric & Writing at UT Austin
Think about the last time you changed a lightbulb. What did you do first? I hope it was turn off the switch. Maybe you’re super safety-minded and even turned off the breaker. Safety is the key here, after all. You obviously don’t want to get electrocuted. But let’s take a minute to think about the thought process behind flipping the switch.
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My HDO Experience: Michelle Jack | Class of 2018
July 17, 2020
Lewis Miller, Assistant Director, HDO
Michelle Jack is an alumna of the HDO Master’s Degree program. In the video below, she chats with Dr. Art Markman, a Professor of Psychology and HDO’s Founding Director, about how she used her HDO Master’s education, particularly Dr. Markman’s course on behavior change, to successfully lead a major change initiative for her previous employer.
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What’s Wrong with My Emails?
July 17, 2020
Dr. Clay Spinuzzi
Why do my colleagues ask me questions that I’ve already covered in my email? How come they missed my most important point? And why can’t they write clear emails that I can understand? Why do we end up having phone calls to cover what we already wrote?
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Is Working at Home Hard?
June 10, 2020
Dr. Clay Spinuzzi
Professor for HDO and Rhetoric & Writing at UT Austin
On March 13, the day before spring break was to begin, the University of Texas announced that it was canceling class. By March 17, UT had announced that all remaining spring classes would transition online. Students—and faculty—were shocked, and we had to do a lot of work to figure out how to gracefully transition these classes. Some classes were easier than others—I imagine my writing classes were much easier to teach online than, say, dance classes or pottery classes. But that doesn’t mean the transition was easy.
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Don’t Panic! Leading Through Crisis
June 1, 2020
Dr. Ken Wisian
Don’t Panic! These words, from the science fiction classic, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” are a good starting point for thinking through a crisis. The world is in the midst of a once-in-a-century cataclysm that threatens public health and undermines governmental and economic stability. People at all levels of society have suddenly found themselves on unfamiliar ground and scrambling to chart a course from day to day and moment to moment.
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Team Work? Pros and Cons of Working in Teams
March 17, 2020
Dr. Mary Rose, HDO Professor
Most of us can probably think of examples in which working with others led to great insights and helped our motivation. But we can probably also recall some counter-examples, in which we felt as if other people got in the way of clear thinking, made us inefficient, or we felt unfairly saddled with the work of others who were not performing.
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HDO Spotlight: Jeremi Suri
November 5, 2019
Miles Husid, HDO Marketing Coordinator
In this edition of the HDO Spotlight, Dr. Jeremi Suri discusses his upcoming commencement address for our Master’s Class of 2019 graduation ceremony in December..
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Research-Based Solutions to Organizational Challenges
October 24, 2019
Miles Husid, HDO Marketing Coordinator
- Is the idea of “corporate culture” a farce?
- How should organizations prepare for generational differences in approaches to leadership?
- What are the connections between marketing efforts, customer satisfaction, and subscription ticket sales?
- When is dissent in an organization productive?
These intriguing questions and many others have been addressed at previous editions of Practical Applications of the Humanities for Modern Organizations.
You are invited to join us for the 2019 edition of this event, which features exciting research by Master’s degree candidates in the Human Dimensions of Organizations (HDO) program at UT Austin.
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