For most of us, harmonic describes a set of musical notes that produce a pleasing sound, or it describes a state of contentment.

For Associate Professor of Mathematics Katharine Ott, harmonic describes a type of function, a mathematical way of representing the relationship between two values. Harmonic functions satisfy Laplace’s equation, which itself “plays a key role in describing many physical phenomena such as heat conduction, electrostatics, and fluid flow,” she says.

Ott’s specialty is harmonic analysis and partial differential equations. “Harmonic analysis,” she adds, “is a branch of mathematics that has to do with breaking a function into simpler parts that have certain properties.

Associate Professor of Mathematics Katharine Ott’s specialty is harmonic analysis and partial differential equations. (Sarah Crosby/�ֲ���ý College)

“Analyzing these smaller pieces individually, then organizing them back together again, can yield important insights into the behavior of functions.”

Which brings us back to harmonics in music. If you know the rates of vibration for notes that sound related to one another — and are appealing for that reason — you’ll generally find that there are predictable mathematical relationships among them.

Ott also works to increase the participation of women in mathematics, organizing programs for high school students and writing about math for the general public. She’s currently the director of GirlsGetMath, a weeklong math and computer science camp for high school girls.

For most of us, emergence is an act of coming forth — the emergence of a child from a hiding spot or a monster from the Black Lagoon.

For Lecturer in Anthropology Joshua Rubin, emergence is a scholarly term that “describes processes of change that are dramatic enough that old forms of social interaction don’t apply anymore, but new ones haven’t taken shape.”

Lecturer in Anthropology Joshua Rubin looks at emergence, when “nobody knows quite where they stand.” (Samuel Mironko ’21/�ֲ���ý College)

Emergence can happen during political revolutions, when old hierarchies and ways of acting fall by the wayside, leading people to act in unpredictable ways.

“In the Russian Revolution, people stopped wearing the clothes they were expected to wear and dressed in really creative outfits,” Rubin says.

Emergence also happens in lower-stakes situations — like rugby matches, on which Rubin wrote his doctoral dissertation.

“Once a rugby game starts, it’s emergent,” he says. “Nobody knows what’s going to happen. It’s not like one of the players is orchestrating where the game is going to go.”

At the moment, Rubin, whose research focuses on southern Africa, is studying another emergent situation: how artists and natural gas dealers make their livings in the years after the 2008 financial crisis in Zimbabwe, when the country experienced massive hyperinflation.

In an environment of “widespread economic precarity,” Rubin says, “nobody knows quite where they stand.”

In this image by Josh Rubin, taken in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, in August 2015, a large tank of propane (left) fills a customer’s home tank (right).

Sometimes, camp involves sitting around a fire eating s’mores. Or, here in Maine, it could be that family cottage by a lake or up north.

For �ֲ���ý professor Charles Nero and other film lovers and scholars of queer studies, camp is also a style that focuses on the excessive and over-the-top — an aesthetic that has been embraced by LGBTQ communities since the mid-20th century.

Charles Nero teaches a session of a First-Year Seminar in August. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

“Camp focuses a lot on style, image,” says Nero, the Benjamin E. Mays ’20 Distinguished Professor of Rhetoric, Film, and Screen Studies. “Some people might say it’s an attention to detail that is excessive. At the same time, for queer people, it is something that allows us to recognize each other and build community with each other.”

So what qualifies as camp?

Think Broadway musicals, particularly classics from the 1940s and ’50s, with their “passionate depictions of love and romance and bursting into song as a way of expressing that passion.”

Or the Bette Davis classic All About Eve. “Every line in the movie is deliberate, intentional, and quite witty, a celebration of wit in the style of Oscar Wilde,” Nero says. “People are constantly glamorous and beautiful and saying smart things.”

Think performers, like Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand, who “have legions of queer people, both male and female, who adore them because of their ability to emote via song,” Nero says.

Margaret O’Brien and Judy Garland perform the song “Under the Bamboo Tree” in Meet Me In St. Louis, a film that Charles Nero says exemplifies the concept of camp. (Photograph by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Life magazine, Vol. 17, No. 24 [public domain], via Wikimedia Commons)

And why is camp important?

Think of the way film depictions of gay and lesbian love were taboo or outright banned for decades, how “Hollywood film was defined by an absence of queer people,” Nero says.

But, of course, queer people still watched movies or worked in the industry. So they “learned to recognize moments of style that felt queer to them, and they could talk about those with other members of their community and form an audience.”

Does camp have downsides?

It can — if, as Nero has, you associate camp and style with historic preservation in gay neighborhoods, associate historic preservation with access to wealth, and wealth with white elites and white gay men around historic preservation.

“It has helped remove people of color from communities, old people, poorer people, and has furthered gentrification,” Nero says. “Some gentrification has to do with style and camp.”

For many of us, a testimony happens in a court of law, or perhaps in a church.

For people who study Latin America, like Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish Stephanie Pridgeon, testimony also refers to a literary genre born from violence and authoritarianism in the 20th century.

A testimonio is “an oral, written, or transcribed firsthand account of political violence and social issues,” Pridgeon says. “It’s a text whose social currency and cultural value are based on the fact that the person witnessed something firsthand.”

During Banned Books Week in 2017, Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish Stephanie Pridgeon talks about confiscated books in Argentina. (Theophil Syslo/�ֲ���ý College)

A famous example is I, Rigoberta Menchú, a recounting of one woman’s experience of violence during the Guatemalan civil war, as told to a Venezuelan anthropologist. Menchú is a K’iche’ Maya human rights activist who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992.

Pridgeon’s research on testimonios focuses on the value a testimonio has when the line between fact and fiction blurs. For example, how much value does a testimonio have when its accuracy is called into question, as was the case with I, Rigoberta Menchú? What happens when artists merge testimonio and documentary filmmaking to show the limitations of both?

Overall, testimonios offer a glimpse of the intersection of personal identity and politics. “How are people going against what people have assumed about them, based on having been a political prisoner or an insurgent or part of one political faction or another?” Pridgeon says.

“It gets into some pretty juicy issues of identity politics and the ways in which people understand themselves vis-à-vis broader coalitions, alliances, or political blocs.”  

In most senses, a bubble is a pocket of gas, encapsulated by liquid.

But for Associate Professor of Economics Paul Shea, bubbles are less tangible — and more dangerous.

“A bubble refers to an asset when its price is higher than what it is worth to someone who actually uses it,” Shea says.

Associate Professor of Economics Paul Shea

The dot com bubble. The housing bubble. in the 17th-century Netherlands. For a time, investing in those industries could make you rich.

But “like other bubbles,” Shea says, “these bubbles must eventually burst, and prices must fall.” Cue plummeting stock prices, closing companies, a collapsed tulip market, the Great Recession.

In 2013, Shea and two co-authors another unfortunate bubble: In 2009 and 2010, “people were accidentally buying worthless shares of bankrupt General Motors stock, because they thought they were shares of the new, reorganized firm.”

For most of us, a bat sleeps upside down in caves or attics. Or, a bat hits home runs.

For Susan Dewsnap, a lecturer in art and visual culture, bats help ceramics like bowls or plates keep their shape.

“The term derives from ‘batten,’ as in, ‘to batten down the hatches’ or hold something secure,” Dewsnap, who has exhibited her ceramics in the U.S. and internationally, says.

Lecturer in art and visual culture Susan Dewsnap teaches a Short Term course in 2015 on soda firing. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Bats are flat objects, usually circular, made of wood, plaster, or plastic. They can be attached to a pottery wheel, and ceramics are created, or thrown, on top of them.

“Bats enable a potter to throw a form on the pottery wheel, and when completed, to remove the pot, while still attached to the bat, without touching the wet work,” Dewsnap says.

The bat is essentially a support, good for creating wide, shallow pieces like plates, which could be deformed if a potter tried to pick them up with her hands. By lifting the piece by the bat, the potter keeps the piece pristine.

A rack of �ֲ���ý’ bats sits in an Olin Arts Center studio, awaiting their ceramicists. (Emily McConville/�ֲ���ý College)

Bats are also useful for making larger pieces, Dewsnap says.

“When making large round jars, I will actually use two bats: one to throw the bottom half of the pot and one to throw the top half,” she says. “After allowing the two sections to set up, the top half, still secured to the bat, is flipped upside down and attached to the bottom half, resulting in a larger form, which is then returned to the wheel, still attached to the bottom bat, for further shaping.”

For most of us, an utterance is a spoken expression. Ralph Waldo Emerson, describing the impulse to share a religious belief, said that “if utterance is denied, the thought lies like a burden on the man.”

For Gina Fatone, an ethnomusicologist who studies the psychology of music transmission, the term is both broader and more specific: Utterances “include physical gestures as well as vocalizations of all sorts,” she says.  “They are multimodal, and can include non-linguistic thought and communication.”

At a rehearsal of the �ֲ���ý Gamelan Orchestra in February, Associate Professor of Music Gina Fatone gives cues to Jade Donaldson ’18 of Wayne, N.J.

An associate professor of music, Fatone studies how people learn to play musical instruments and the intersection of music, gesture, and cognition. Her use of the term “utterance,” she says, is borrowed from gesture studies, where it typically describes a unit of communication.

The word “utterance” gets at something we often take for granted, Fatone says: that learning to play an instrument doesn’t always involve actually playing the instrument. Conducting-like gestures — utterances made with the hands by teachers — helps musicians find a more expressive way to play, creating a neurological connection between motion and sound.

Many teachers also use metaphors to get certain sounds out of their students. “There’s the image of stretching and relaxing an elastic band to get at a more pliable rhythm, for example,” Fatone says. It’s a metaphor valuable for students who are a bit too dependent on the metronome.

Fatone shares another example: how people learn the , a South Asian drum played in pairs. Traditionally, before they’re even allowed to touch the drums, tabla learners have to be able to speak what they’re going to play, using a specialized system of vocables that represent drum strokes.

From there, “their hands can much more easily utter the correct sounds on the instrument, because learning the voice of the drum with their own voice first has embedded the music in their system in a highly nuanced way that’s very salient,” Fatone says.

The utterances, in this case, are both the vocalizations — the singing — and the playing of the drums themselves.

“They can be conflated in our minds and our bodies so that we experience them as one unitary utterance,” she says.

Defining utterances more broadly, in other words, show us that music is more than sound. It’s where images, thought, and body come together in one expression.

You can host a party. You can host a TV show.

But in Associate Professor of Biology Lee Abrahamsen’s profession, a “host” is more likely to harbor a parasite. 

Rachel Blaustein ’18 of Needham, Mass., stands with Associate Professor of Biology Lee Abrahamsen during a biology lab in 2016.

Many people think of a biological host in terms of disease — a person plays host to the flu virus. But a bacterium can host a piece of “donor” DNA.

A host, Abrahamsen says, “is really anything that harbors something else in a way that allows the ‘something else’ to survive.”

Abrahamsen’s priority used to be virology; she used embryonic lung cells as hosts to grow the human herpes virus. About a decade ago, in order to bring more senior thesis students into her work, she shifted to bacteriology, studying antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

“The host becomes the thing that’s infected,” she said. “So the host can be a single cell, or it can be a whole organism. We’ve looked at different strains of antibiotic-resistant staph in people, in students, in dogs, and in horses. All of those are hosts.

“It’s not so much about the specific species involved, but more about the relationship between one organism and another. It really does swap meaning depending on what you’re talking about.”

When you have a fender-bender, you call the insurance agency. When you buy alcohol in Maine, you’re at an agency liquor store.

However, for scholars like Professor of Sociology Emily Kane, “agency” frequently describes not a place but a state of being: our capacity to “act creatively and intentionally” in society despite “constraints that shape and sometimes determine our possibilities in the social world.”

In Kane’s work, those constraints are known as social structures and they include race, class, gender, sexuality, public policy, and family.

At the 2016 banquet for seniors who earned honors in their majors, Professor of Sociology Emily Kane introduces guest speaker Bridget Harr ’07, Kane’s former student and current colleague in the sociology department. Kane is holding Harr’s honors thesis. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Much of what Kane and other social scientists look at, of course, are questions about who has agency, who doesn’t, and who is trying to resist or change the structures that constrain them. As an example of this interplay, she points to her book Rethinking Gender and Sexuality in Childhood (2013).

“Children are not simply passive recipients.”

As Kane points out in her book, when it comes to childhood experiences, it’s long been assumed that adults have agency and children don’t. After all, we adults decide where a child will live and, for the most part, with whom they interact. Children’s experiences are also shaped and constrained by various “structures of inequality,” Kane says, like race, class, and gender.

But, as Kane argues in her book, “children are not simply passive recipients” of what we and society determine for them. In fact, children are “lively actors,” Kane says, with all kinds of agency. “They are capable of engaging in creative interpretation and reconstruction of the world around them.”

A professional athlete negotiates a contract extension. A hiker negotiates difficult terrain.

Professor of French and Francophone Studies Alexandre Dauge-Roth is known internationally for his research into the narratives of survivors of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. When he uses the word “negotiate,” he means this:

“For the survivor of genocide or another traumatic experience, the meaning and memory of that experience has an ongoing resonance, or rather a haunting dissonance, that requires constant negotiation, which is triggered by the cultural and political demands that define the present from which the traumatic past is re-envisioned.”

For more than a decade, Dauge-Roth and his students have traveled to Rwanda to interview survivors and hear their stories. This indirect act of “bearing witness,” he explains, is nevertheless a “mutually transformative encounter for both survivor and interlocutor” — one that demands an approach to  testimony as a “social and cultural practice of negotiation.”

Alexandre Dauge-Roth, associate professor of French and francophone studies, shown during a class. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

On the one hand, he continues, “survivors negotiate the possibility of having their trauma socially recognized and their present-day demands heard.”

The concept of negotiation “highlights the fact that cultural and existential trauma requires an ongoing and demanding effort.”

On the other, “we — the listening community — must negotiate the historical place, cultural resonance, and political meaning we are willing to give to a highly disturbing experience that embodies the transgression of all ethical norms and the collapse of the social bond.”

In the end, the concept of negotiation “highlights the fact that bearing witness to cultural and existential trauma requires an interruption, a demanding effort to listen, and an ongoing creativity. The meanings of experiences of pain and suffering are confined neither to a past experience nor to survivors alone.”

All testimonial encounters between survivors and their interlocutors engage “multiple views, expectations, trajectories, histories, dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, and all the relationships of power and knowledge that the cultural negotiation of a traumatic past entails within a mutually shared present.”

Academic disciplines often assign particular and surprising meanings to common words. The series “What I Mean When I Say” explores those meanings.