Course Expectations

Course expectations

33% Participation. This course will be discussion-centric. Diligent digital attendance and full participation are essential. Everyone will be asked at some point in the term to briefly present a reading or set of readings at least once, and to set the frame for and open the discussion for that session. I've tried to keep the readings to a manageable amount, recognizing that many of you have other extensive demands on your time; each week I've also included a number of supplemental reading suggestions that would be great to engage as your time permits. 

67% Writing. You will also produce one long (6-8,000 words) or three short (~2-3000 words) piece/s of written (or otherwise structured, i.e. shareable and iterable) work. It would be good to publish it here, but it is not necessary. The form and content requirements of these are (unsurprisingly) somewhat open-ended. But a general expectation is: they should be something "experimental" for you, something exploratory, something in a genre or voice you may not have previously adopted. One could be a long-form blog post; another might be a podcast; one could be a short video or a photo essay; one might be the opening of an article for a journal in another field, articulating anthropology's import for the sister discipline; another might be a short piece of fiction or a poem in //terza rima//. Another way to think about this: the intended audience should be one outside, or to the side of, the (imagined) professional readership that orients most of what you are or will be writing. Your writing should concern the themes and questions of the readings, and the readings should provide a foundation or bounce-point -- but it should not be about simply encapsulating or restating an author's argument, or extracting and extending an article's argument--i.e., the traditional seminar paper. (Although I am open to this, if that is what works for you.) Your work/s here should also make extensive or even exclusive use of materials from your own research and interests, shaping them into forms that may diverge from pre-formed expectations. We will talk more about this, and I am more than happy to give feedback on half-baked ideas, drafts, and other forms of iteration.