By Sarah Geegan, Jonathon Spalding

It started with a simple question, then grew into a large online survey with responses from over 1,000 people from across the U.S. and abroad. A new book by Ellen Riggle and Sharon Rostosky, “A Positive View of LGBTQ: Embracing Identity and Cultivating Well-Being," explores what’s positive about lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer identities.

“It is the right question at the right time. People want to share their positive experiences,” said Riggle, UK professor in the departments of Gender and Women’s Studies and Political Science.

By Sarah Geegan

Two University of Kentucky faculty members will travel to India from Jan. 29-Feb. 3 as part of a delegation formed by the Institute of International Education (IIE), to foster ties in higher education between India and the U.S.

Asia Center Director Keiko Tanaka, and Srimati Basu, associate professor of Gender and Women's studies, and will join high level administrators from 10 other U.S. colleges and universities on a study tour to Hyderabad, Mumbai and Delhi. They will meet with their counterparts at diverse Indian institutions to learn more about the nation's higher education system.

Basu and Tanaka will join

By Whitney Hale

The LGBT community is quite diverse in Lexington. In hopes of representing and celebrating the population's various differences, University of Kentucky Gaines Fellow and knitter Catherine Brereton has launched the Diversity Project, which seeks to create a visual representation of the community through a large piece of yarn-art. One stitch at a time, Brereton hopes the Diversity Project will create unity.

To finish the final product, a blanket made of 144 squares, Brereton is asking the public to take part in the initiative. There are various ways to participate in the project including a knitting event this weekend beginning at 11 a.m. Sunday, Nov. 20, at Great Bagel, located at 396 Woodland Avenue in Lexington. For more information on this event, visit Facebook at 

By Erin Holaday Ziegler

University of Kentucky creative writing Professor  Nikky Finney has won the 2011 National Book Award in Poetry for her recent work, “Head Off & Split.”  Finney attended the award ceremony last night in New York City, where she accepted the highly prestigious honor.

“Head Off & Split” was published by Northwestern University Press in February of this year, and Finney has been touring with the book since late winter.

The National Book Award website says the poems in Finney's "Head Off & Split" "sustain a sensitive and intense dialogue with emblematic figures and events in African-American life: from Civil Rights matriarch Rosa Parks, to former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, from a brazen girl strung out on lightning, to a terrified woman abandoned on a

By Erin Holaday Ziegler

The University of Kentucky College of Arts & Sciences will host a trailblazing American diplomat next week to continue the college's Year of China initiative.

Former U.S. Ambassador Julia Chang Bloch will speak on “Leadership and Education in a Globalizing World: China’s Challenge” at 5 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 10, in Room 118 of the White Hall Classroom Building on UK's campus.

Bloch’s talk, which is free and open to the public, is sponsored by the "Passport to China: Global Issues & Local Understanding" course taught by UK sociology Professor Keiko Tanaka.

Ambassador Bloch, the first Asian-American ambassador in American history, has had a broad career in U.S. government service. She is currently president of the U.S.-China Education Trust, a nonprofit organization working

By Erin Holaday, Colleen Glenn

It’s almost time for class and you’re still in your dorm room. But you’re not going to be late. There’s plenty of time to walk downstairs.

Imagine what residence halls will be like in 2020. That’s what the College of Arts & Sciences did when they created a new living and learning community at Keeneland Hall.

Debuting this fall, 

As a current board member of a company she boycotted during apartheid, Zohra Ebrahim is a dynamic testament to the New South Africa.

Ebrahim draws on her past of political activism, as well as a wealth of experience on corporate boards, to assess the role of women in contemporary South Africa.

Women have gained a great deal in the new South Africa. It is the third most equitable

The most comfortable way to understand a controversial issue is through the eyes and experience of someone like yourself — through normal, everyday people whose challenges and beliefs relate to your own.  That is the way the issue of homosexuality and its often tumultuous relationship with Christianity is told in the documentary "For the Bible Tells Me So" being shown at the University of Kentucky this week.
When 

Graduate Student

Cracking the Code of Masculinity

by Andrew Battista
photos by Mark Cornelison

Betsy Dahms has known since her childhood that masculinity can mean a variety of things. Growing up with eight brothers and one sister, Dahms developed an acute awareness that a person’s masculinity can never be reduced to a single form or expression. It is this aspect of her family upbringing that has most significantly influenced Dahms’ budding scholarly and pedagogical career.

“My father died when I was young, so I didn’t grow up with a father-figure in my life,” said Dahms.“In my house I was able to see how my brothers were treated versus how my sister and I were treated, and I often thought to myself, ‘wow, that’s different.’”

This disparate treatment did not end when Dahms left her Northern