New Jersey has some of the strongest laws against workplace discrimination in the country. That also means the intricacies of the law are hard for busy working people to grasp. There are so many categories of protection that everyone is guaranteed to fall into at least one.

Workers and employers can learn about all those categories, as well as try to detect instances of discrimination in hypothetical workplace scenarios, during the first weekend of Rutgers’ “Huddle with the Faculty” Gameday Seminars.

Other seminars include:

October 18 – Homecoming

A Road Less Traveled: From the Senate to the White House
Ross K. Baker, Professor, Political Science, School of Arts and Sciences

Where Have All the Bees Gone?
Rachael Winfree, Assistant Professor, Entomology, School of Environmental and Biological Sciences

November 8

Microbes: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Joan Bennett, Professor, Plant Biology and Pathology, School of Environmental and Biological Sciences; Associate Vice President for the Promotion of Women in Science, Engineering, and Mathematics

Truth to Power: Race, Class, and Gender Relations in the '90s
Deborah Gray White, Board of Governors Professor of History, School of Arts and Sciences

November 22

Healthy Choices: How We Perceive Medical Risks
Gretchen Chapman, Chair and Professor, Psychology, School of Arts and Sciences

Great American Football Songs
George B. Stauffer, Dean and Professor, Mason Gross School of the Arts

Gameday Seminars were conceived last year by President Richard L. McCormick as a way to mix Rutgers’ wealth of scholarship with the growing interest in the Scarlet Knights’ football team. The lectures on Busch Campus are held three hours before games, giving participants enough time to take their seats before kickoff.

The first day of seminars is September 27, when Rutgers faces off against Morgan State University. Barbara Lee, a professor at Rutgers’ School of Management and Labor Relations, will discuss discrimination on the job and in higher education. Another seminar by Ben. Sifuentes-Jáuregui will take a close look at youth culture and behavior as reflected through music videos. Sifuentes-Jáuregui is associate professor and chair of the Department of American Studies.

Anyone who works in New Jersey – college students working part time, boomers looking to retire, or small-business owners – should have a better idea of what exactly workplace discrimination is. The definitions, Lee said, can be hazy.

“I think that people have a tendency to misperceive what kinds of protections there are. They may feel that any unfair decision is illegal and is discrimination,” Lee said. “It’s not.”

Conversely, Lee said, everyone could potentially face discrimination. Categories of protection in New Jersey include race, creed, color, national origin, nationality, ancestry, age, sex (including pregnancy and sexual harassment), marital status, domestic partnership status, affectional or sexual orientation, atypical hereditary cellular or blood traits, genetic information, liability for military service, and mental or physical disability, including AIDS- and HIV-related illnesses. Last year, a law went into affect protecting transgender people against discrimination, making New Jersey the ninth state to offer that protection.

There are exceptions, Lee said. “If you’re hiring a priest for a Catholic church, you can insist that person be Catholic.”

Lee will present examples of workplace conflicts, and seminar participants will decide which represent discrimination and which don’t. “I don’t take sides in cases,” Lee said. “I talk about what the law requires and what employers must do. And employers have rights too.”

Sifuentes-Jáuregui discusses music videos with his undergraduate and graduate students regularly in class. Now he hopes to take that discussion to a wider audience – one that includes his students’ parents.

“MTV as Textbook: Reading Culture through Music Videos” seeks to get people thinking about music videos and what they say about American culture. Often, Sifuentes-Jáuregui said, music videos drastically change the original meaning of a song. For example, images in the video for Melissa Manchester’s 1989 rendition of “Walk on By” turned a tune sung by a forlorn lover into a political statement about homelessness.

“Reading” music videos as texts – works by artists like Eminem, 50 Cent, and Lil’ Kim – can also provide insight into a youth culture with high levels of visual literacy. “This generation, raised with music videos, is interested in the fragment, the snippet, the one-liner, as opposed to the full, extended text of a work,” Sifuentes-Jáuregui said. Attention spans are growing even shorter as music videos are increasingly viewed on mobile devices like MP3 players and cell phones.

But, along with well-developed visual literacy, have come decreased attention spans, Sifuentes-Jáuregui argues. “Videos are a product of a generation that learns to see things in very quick ways ... People are no longer reading Moby Dick.”

Sifuentes-Jáuregui hopes to challenge the notions of people who would write off the idea of music videos as cultural or literary texts. “These questions are dismissed so readily, when in fact they circulate almost everywhere in American culture,” he said.

Gameday Seminars take place throughout the football season. Registration is $10 and includes the lecture and Q&A, followed by a tailgate party with cash bar.