The Our Daily Work/ Our Daily Lives lecture and performance is a joint collaboration between the Michigan Traditional Arts Program at the MSU Museum, and the Labor Education Program from the MSU School of Labor and Industrial Relations. The lecture will be held at the MSU Museum Auditorium 12:15-1:30 p.m.

The Our Daily Work/ Our Daily Lives show will be the 14th time the event has taken place at MSU, said John Beck, associate director of the MSU School of Labor and Industrial Relations.

Created to focus on the cultural traditions of workers and the richness and diversity of worker experience, the program will be presented this year as the concert “Rocking Blood River: Songs of Working Class Detroit” from Don “Doop” Duprie and the Inside Outlaws.

“This is the first time that we decided to do an outdoor concert, so this is a great opportunity for students and faculty to get some free music on the last day of classes,” Beck said. “Let’s just hope the weather holds. It should be nice until at least until Friday.”

The program will be the last event of the Brown Bag Lecture series for the semester. A lunchtime presentation series, the brown bag lectures have ranged in attendance and topics and included several MSU professors as speakers.
“We normally average as few as three people coming to a lecture and as many as 95,” Beck said. “We’ve done a number this year, and I think they have been pretty successful overall.”

Lindon Robison, a professor in the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, think the lectures have been valuable for the university and students.

“The benefit of these lectures are they’re in a setting where you can exchange information in a less formal way,” Robison said. “You can speak about or describe information that you may be in the process of working on, without going through all the formal procedures and you can review things that might not fit into a formal lecture somewhere else.”

Robison, who gave a lecture in the series this week, hopes more students will take an interest in the lectures and that faculty will speak on topics that could be of interest to students.

“In the College of Agriculture, usually the lectures are attended mostly by graduate students and faculty,” Robison said. “I think it’s important to see the interests of the students and what’s presented are aligned.”

History professor Javier Pescador gave a lecture in the series last semester. Although about 20 people showed up for his lecture, Pescador thought it was a decent turnout given the day of the week and the time of his lecture.
“From the arts and humanities to the social sciences, you can see that they have a very strong central component,” Pescador said.

Pescador said he thinks the lectures could be advertised more to MSU students and faculty, but he is pleased with the diversity in the series.

“They did a good job in balancing the different backgrounds and the diversity,” Pescador said. “Each lecture was angled to a central trend, and I think it was a great opportunity to present my research before such a diverse audience.”
_
Staff writer Andrew Krietz contributed to this report._