Thematic Talks for KHJ: Wine & Cheese Format Initiative/Open Call for Input Talks by KHG People

Introduction

My office of chairman to the board for KHJ is very much in service of KHG, where, absent a strong/vocal Catholic identitity group even in Upper Austria nowadays, or, at least at the university. It is a place I have come to appreciate, and yes, love! One thing I see missing however is an old tradition, of hosting and holding talks and workshops under the banner of "thematic" ("thematisch" in German) @KHG.

I want to initate the appropriate resuciatation! Join me in this first aid effort.

The Idea

Wine and Cheese are intended to help restore the core intellectual tradition of topical evenings held at KHG pre-Covid but that somehow got lost for a little while. So now we, as the KHG (resident-) and KHJ (spiritual) community, want to draw on the specific and meaningful knowledge of the community itself, predominantly, and enable and encourage exchange, debate, and presentation among peers. With a quiet foundation in Christian values, my approach has a pragmatics of trying to give people tools for self-help and change. So for example, the very first KHJ Wine and Cheese Prototype had a techy Web Apps topic, because that is how I myself happen to earn money and make my studies happen at Masters level, as far as the studies allow for work.

I see many peers not working in their field and my concrete goal I shared with my audience, where I held the main input talk before a workshop and lively discussion of learning paths as well as technologies, was to give them resources to help them move to IT work since that is an idea many of them harbor anyway, naturally, and as they told me previously in private. So it was very much about bringing the right people together as well as establishing the format, where I hope to call on other speakers in the future.

As opposed to other topical groups, e.g. technical communities at JKU for AI or CS, say, while our topics might take their impulse from our day-to-day study focus, the idea is to go beyond and connect to a pragmatics as in the above, or generally, to look a bit beyond our field and back at society, informed by our knowledge. I think this shapes the format and justifies the Christian value foundation from an intellectual perspective, since absent of such values, this is hard/meaningless to do, I would hold, in the sense that such a social critique would become an objectifying social science lecture or topic in and of itself, not an attempt at dialog grounded in some force field bringing us back and back again to something we can agree upon is crucial for how we want to actually live in the world, all things considered, not just understanding some aspect of life, leaving the rest of our lived exprience disconnected from any insight gained.

Talks Happening Currently

JKU of course has technical focus to a degree, Masters degree or PhD even, but still, the thought is to expand horizons beyond technical fields and get into a rhythm: now techy, next time philosophical; a talk by someone in KHG, then a talk by someone from outside. A workshop-, then a discussion-focus. And so on. So, here is my current roadmap with official announcement anticipated in the KHG community soon.

• Xmas Workshop MQTT (x IT:U & Dynamic Projection Institute)
• Queering Church, at the University (Invited Talk with a PhD Student (Theology))

Open Call for Wine & Cheese Input Talks by KHG People (KHGlis in German)

Bring in your talk: write to jack.heseltine@khg.jku.at, "especially if you live at KHG." Let's be flexible here.

Talks in Planning

This will be updated regularly.

• KHJ x Neuron AI Collaboration
• Neuroinformatics (Invited/Informal Talk with a Prof. (Neuroinformatics))

Other Ideas

As the emerge, without concrete planning steps (yet).

• KHJ x Pro Scientia Collaboration
• Clown Workshop
• (and/or) Improv/Moderation Workshop

Format Details

Why Wine and Cheese? This section to be added soon.