Former Tide Talks president Kevin Pabst, a senior majoring in communications studies from Niceville, Florida, will give his own Tide Talk on Friday, April 17, at 7 p.m. in Russell Hall.
What are you speaking about?
This next Tide Talks, I will be talking about satire using my background drawing cartoons for The Crimson White and whatnot, speaking to its power as a rhetorical tool to engage people in conversations about current events, cast subjects in new lights and encourage folks to consider ideas they might otherwise reject.
How did you choose your topic?
I’ve been doing cartoons for The Crimson White since my freshman year, sporadically at first but more consistently recently, and I’ve always had a love of comedy of all forms and satire, specifically. There were a couple of instances last year with a cartoon that I released that got a little bit of controversy because it was misunderstood, and then other forms of satire more recently with the Charlie Hebdo incident, Trevor Noah, Colbert had an incident last summer. It just seems like recently satire is causing a lot of fuss, and I wanted to examine why that was.
Why did you want to come back and speak after being president?
Somebody nominated me, I don’t really know who. Last year David Phelps was the first president, and after he handed it over, the very next Tide Talks, which was also the last of the year, he was no longer president, he gave a Tide Talk which I nominated him for. So now I’m doing the same. It’s probably going to become a Tide Talks tradition for the outgoing president to end their senior year giving a Tide Talk.
How did you find out about Tide Talks and what made you join?
My sophomore year, which is when it started, a group of about six or seven juniors and seniors were getting it together and they needed a designer to help them get it off the ground. I happened to be pretty good friends with one of them on the team, and she reached out to me and talked to me about joining. Reluctantly I did so and ended up falling in love with it and then eventually ended up taking over as president myself.
How have you prepared to give your talk?
I’ve been doing a lot of research on the incidents that I mentioned and others as well, satire in general, and compiling a few different case studies that I’m going to be examining during my talk. Just putting together my PowerPoint and exactly what it is that I want to say. I had ideas going in of what I wanted to talk about its just developing those ideas a little bit more into the proper context.
