VALLEY CITY, N.D (VCSU) – Valley City State University is pleased to host Iowa State Professor Dr. Craig Rood Thursday night, April 13th, at 7 p.m. in Room 102 of the Rhoades Science Center for the inaugural talk in its annual Conversations with Alumni series, a series dedicated to bringing VCSU alums home to share their accomplishments with the community.

In his presentation entitled “Imagining Protection from Gun Violence,” Dr. Rood, as a scholar of communication, will direct our attention to unexpected places—stories, memory, and imagination—in helping us identify how America’s dominant narrative of protection is a kind of “stranger danger” that imagines “we” are in danger from “them,” outsiders who can be understood literally (people from outside “our” home, community, or country), metaphorically (people who are different from “us,” in terms of appearance, beliefs, or identity), or both. After assessing both the power and problems with that narrative, he then analyzes personal stories about gun suicide and domestic gun violence to help us think differently about human character, about guns, and about moments of gun violence.

Craig Rood grew up in Valley City and attended VCSU from 2004-2006. He is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric at Iowa State University and the author of After Gun Violence: Deliberation and Memory in an Age of Political Gridlock (2019).

The presentation is sponsored by the office of the Vice President of Academic Affairs, the Communication, Social Science, and Language and Literature Departments, and the Vikings Campus Activities Board, and is free and open to the public.