Mon 5/2
11:30 Cara
1:15 Jenn, Ashley
1:45 Lindsay, Bonita
2:15 Cate, Samantha
Tues 5/3
1:30 Kelsey, Tori
Wed 5/4
10:30 Amber
11:30 David
12:00 Gregg, Kelly
12:45 Caitlin, Gabriela
1:15 Joey, Bianca
2:15: Rebecca, Cassinda
Friday, April 29, 2011
RESPONSE TO OUTISIDE SOURCES
For your RESPONSE TO OUTSIDE SOURCES, imagine yourself as the Moderator of a Panel Discussion between your four sources.
To do this: first pick at least 4 points of comparison between your sources. The can be places where your sources agree, or disagree, etc. You might also discuss differences and similarities between the Methods Used by the author of each source, i.e. observation, interview, close reading etc.
Use these points of comparison to develop an outline for your RESPONSE TO SOURCES PAPER.
Then, fill in your outline with direct quotes and other examples you will use to build your Discussion of the sources.
*A note about Summary: It will be important to briefly summarize each source and its author's purpose. Of still greater importance will be the ways in which you analyze your sources by drawing comparisons, and making connections between them.
I will be passing a conference sign-up sheet around during class.
To do this: first pick at least 4 points of comparison between your sources. The can be places where your sources agree, or disagree, etc. You might also discuss differences and similarities between the Methods Used by the author of each source, i.e. observation, interview, close reading etc.
Use these points of comparison to develop an outline for your RESPONSE TO SOURCES PAPER.
Then, fill in your outline with direct quotes and other examples you will use to build your Discussion of the sources.
*A note about Summary: It will be important to briefly summarize each source and its author's purpose. Of still greater importance will be the ways in which you analyze your sources by drawing comparisons, and making connections between them.
I will be passing a conference sign-up sheet around during class.
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Wednesday April 27
MEET IN WILSON 101 COMPUTER LAB
Schedule:
I. Free-writing:
1) consider your "Field Work" HW. What did you do? How successful was it? What would make it more successful? What's next?
2) consider your research: What sources have you found so far? What kind of source or information would complement what you have already? What would you still like to find out?
II. EVALUATIONS.
III. Independent Research. The remainder of the class period will be yours to find additional sources, or continue reading and evaluating sources you have already found.
*We'll also use this time to sign-up for conferences for Mon and Wed of next week.*
HW:
For Friday, 1) BRING YOUR FOUR SOURCES PRINTED OUT TO CLASS
and 2)have completed a second "Field work" task: another interview, observation, etc, and bring a brief write-up of your results.
Schedule:
I. Free-writing:
1) consider your "Field Work" HW. What did you do? How successful was it? What would make it more successful? What's next?
2) consider your research: What sources have you found so far? What kind of source or information would complement what you have already? What would you still like to find out?
II. EVALUATIONS.
III. Independent Research. The remainder of the class period will be yours to find additional sources, or continue reading and evaluating sources you have already found.
*We'll also use this time to sign-up for conferences for Mon and Wed of next week.*
HW:
For Friday, 1) BRING YOUR FOUR SOURCES PRINTED OUT TO CLASS
and 2)have completed a second "Field work" task: another interview, observation, etc, and bring a brief write-up of your results.
Monday, April 25, 2011
Scedule for Weeks of 4/25
Mon:
1) present Ethnographic Writing Project assignment
2) work on designing and planning Field Work
3) think about Response to Outside Sources
HW: Continue Research and Field Work studies
Wed.
1) Meet in WILSON 101 COMPUTER LAB to continue research
2) Sign-up for conferences
HW: Continue Research and Field Work studies
Fri.
1) Work on Response to Outside Sources
HW: Response to Outside Sources & Analysis of Symbolic Action due at Conferences: to turn in, for a grade
1) present Ethnographic Writing Project assignment
2) work on designing and planning Field Work
3) think about Response to Outside Sources
HW: Continue Research and Field Work studies
Wed.
1) Meet in WILSON 101 COMPUTER LAB to continue research
2) Sign-up for conferences
HW: Continue Research and Field Work studies
Fri.
1) Work on Response to Outside Sources
HW: Response to Outside Sources & Analysis of Symbolic Action due at Conferences: to turn in, for a grade
ETHNOGRAPHIC WRITING PROJECT
Your end-of-semester project consists of several distinct parts.
1) Response to Outside Sources: 3-4 pages, DUE AT CONFERENCES (MAY 2-4)
2) Your own write-up of a Symbolic Action, built around your Field Work, close reading(s) and your analysis of these: 2-3 pages, DUE AT CONFERENCES (MAY 2-4)
*You will turn both of these in at the conference, and they will be graded. Our goal at the conference will be to discuss how you combine these two papers into the longer paper (#3) described below:
3) A longer paper (at least 6 pages) that combines the two above, your outside sources, with your own research and analysis, FIRST DRFAT DUE MAY6, FINAL DRAFT DUE MAY 9
4) 12-20 photos that illustrate your project or some aspect of it, with captions, due at the Exam Period, FRI MAY 13. These your may display in hard-copy, or on your blog.
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Deborah Luster and CD Wright ONE BIG SELF
Wed 4/20/11
Introduce and Discuss ONE BIG SELF
Last 10-15 min. view more photo-essays.
For Friday:
Finish ONE BIG SELF
Prompt for Friday Paper (optional): What is CD Wright able to "document" with her poetry that possibly could not have been documented with other writing methods? Essentially, what are the unique advantages of her writing poetry about the lives of women prisoners in Louisiana?
Looking Ahead:
Next Friday 4/29: 3-4 page response to sources due. You will want to summarize each of your four total sources, and then compare and contrast the sources both in terms of subject-matter, and also for the researching and writing methods used by each author. I will give you more formal information for this assignment on Mon 4/25.
Initial Draft of Ethnographic Writing Project due at CONFERENCES 5/2 - 5/4. For this project, you will combine your Field Research, your "library/internet" research, and your own analysis (which you've already practiced in your "Symbolic Action" papers into 1 cohesive research paper of at least 6 full pages. I will provide more formal information for this assignment also on Mon 4/25.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myz_W7A33As -- Luster on NPR
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1IZYf6ODug -- Luster at San Fran MOMA
"I wanted to see if my art could handle that hoe"
"The obvious truth, people are people"
"What I wanted was to unequivocally lay out the feel of hard time"
From The Boston Review
The photographer Deborah Luster had already spent a year taking photographs of prisoners in Louisiana when she invited the poet C.D. Wright to accompany her to the minimum-security East Carroll Parish Prison Farm in Transylvania, Louisiana; the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women at St. Gabriel; and the maximum-security prison at Angola, Louisiana, the largest such facility in the United States. In the end, Wright wrote a series of poems to accompany Luster’s photographic project. Their image-and-text collaboration was published in 2003 by Twin Palms Publishers as a glossy art book with the title One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana. Inmates cooperated with Luster in deciding how they might be depicted (within the limits of a prison milieu, obviously); as a result, the photographs range from conventional portraits to images incorporating props, special clothing, or, conversely, degrees of undressing. Tattoos feature prominently in an environment where micro-control over the body is a preeminent struggle between imprisoned and imprisoner. Some of Luster’s subjects wear costumes for Halloween or Mardi Gras celebrations; some are dressed for prison rodeos or culinary classes. Not all are African American, though the majority are. They are divided fairly evenly between women and men.
Copper Canyon Press recently published Wright’s poems separately as One Big Self: An Investigation. By switching the original subtitle to “an investigation,” Wright emphasizes an exploratory descriptive mode that complements and comments on Luster’s more straightforward approach. Luster produced actual documents: she claims to have given nearly 25,000 wallet-size prints back to the prisoners she photographed. While Wright provides plenty of direct testimony—her own and from inmates—accrued during and after her visits, her writing also displays skepticism about poetry’s documentary capacities. After all, there’s more concrete information on the history of Gloucester, Massachusetts, to be gleaned from relatively short sections in history and reference books than in the 600-plus pages of Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poems. The transmission of pure information isn’t poetry’s task. But then, there’s no such thing as pure information, which is what almost every type of poetry reminds its audience. Language mediates; and poetry—perhaps more than any literary form—continually materializes its mediations.
Distrusting poetry as unmediated communication doesn’t necessarily hinder its imperative to convey. If anything, it gives it a sense of urgency and instigates creative forms of expression. Similarly, the trajectory of Wright’s poetry over three decades reveals an ongoing development of innovative ways to present precise details. Her writing in One Big Self consists primarily of found and constructed fragments, ambiguous lists, and partial confessions that fail to provide much consolation. “Nothing will be settled or made easy,” she writes near the end of the book where it might be tempting to generate summaries or conclusions. As anyone familiar with the work of Michel Foucault knows, the all-seeing panopticon is a primary means of control within modern prison systems—and in society at large. (Readers of Foucault are less likely to know that the panopticon structure was originally schemed as a way to subjugate not inmates but labor, as Peter Linebaugh points out in The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century.) Wright subverts this totalizing awareness and its dream of omniscience by letting slip what might not be known and what mostly eludes—so far—technology’s unblinking gaze: memory, hope, regret, love, and the fundamental errancy at the heart of what it means to be human.
Introduce and Discuss ONE BIG SELF
Last 10-15 min. view more photo-essays.
For Friday:
Finish ONE BIG SELF
Prompt for Friday Paper (optional): What is CD Wright able to "document" with her poetry that possibly could not have been documented with other writing methods? Essentially, what are the unique advantages of her writing poetry about the lives of women prisoners in Louisiana?
Looking Ahead:
Next Friday 4/29: 3-4 page response to sources due. You will want to summarize each of your four total sources, and then compare and contrast the sources both in terms of subject-matter, and also for the researching and writing methods used by each author. I will give you more formal information for this assignment on Mon 4/25.
Initial Draft of Ethnographic Writing Project due at CONFERENCES 5/2 - 5/4. For this project, you will combine your Field Research, your "library/internet" research, and your own analysis (which you've already practiced in your "Symbolic Action" papers into 1 cohesive research paper of at least 6 full pages. I will provide more formal information for this assignment also on Mon 4/25.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myz_W7A33As -- Luster on NPR
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1IZYf6ODug -- Luster at San Fran MOMA
"I wanted to see if my art could handle that hoe"
"The obvious truth, people are people"
"What I wanted was to unequivocally lay out the feel of hard time"
From The Boston Review
The photographer Deborah Luster had already spent a year taking photographs of prisoners in Louisiana when she invited the poet C.D. Wright to accompany her to the minimum-security East Carroll Parish Prison Farm in Transylvania, Louisiana; the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women at St. Gabriel; and the maximum-security prison at Angola, Louisiana, the largest such facility in the United States. In the end, Wright wrote a series of poems to accompany Luster’s photographic project. Their image-and-text collaboration was published in 2003 by Twin Palms Publishers as a glossy art book with the title One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana. Inmates cooperated with Luster in deciding how they might be depicted (within the limits of a prison milieu, obviously); as a result, the photographs range from conventional portraits to images incorporating props, special clothing, or, conversely, degrees of undressing. Tattoos feature prominently in an environment where micro-control over the body is a preeminent struggle between imprisoned and imprisoner. Some of Luster’s subjects wear costumes for Halloween or Mardi Gras celebrations; some are dressed for prison rodeos or culinary classes. Not all are African American, though the majority are. They are divided fairly evenly between women and men.
Copper Canyon Press recently published Wright’s poems separately as One Big Self: An Investigation. By switching the original subtitle to “an investigation,” Wright emphasizes an exploratory descriptive mode that complements and comments on Luster’s more straightforward approach. Luster produced actual documents: she claims to have given nearly 25,000 wallet-size prints back to the prisoners she photographed. While Wright provides plenty of direct testimony—her own and from inmates—accrued during and after her visits, her writing also displays skepticism about poetry’s documentary capacities. After all, there’s more concrete information on the history of Gloucester, Massachusetts, to be gleaned from relatively short sections in history and reference books than in the 600-plus pages of Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poems. The transmission of pure information isn’t poetry’s task. But then, there’s no such thing as pure information, which is what almost every type of poetry reminds its audience. Language mediates; and poetry—perhaps more than any literary form—continually materializes its mediations.
Distrusting poetry as unmediated communication doesn’t necessarily hinder its imperative to convey. If anything, it gives it a sense of urgency and instigates creative forms of expression. Similarly, the trajectory of Wright’s poetry over three decades reveals an ongoing development of innovative ways to present precise details. Her writing in One Big Self consists primarily of found and constructed fragments, ambiguous lists, and partial confessions that fail to provide much consolation. “Nothing will be settled or made easy,” she writes near the end of the book where it might be tempting to generate summaries or conclusions. As anyone familiar with the work of Michel Foucault knows, the all-seeing panopticon is a primary means of control within modern prison systems—and in society at large. (Readers of Foucault are less likely to know that the panopticon structure was originally schemed as a way to subjugate not inmates but labor, as Peter Linebaugh points out in The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century.) Wright subverts this totalizing awareness and its dream of omniscience by letting slip what might not be known and what mostly eludes—so far—technology’s unblinking gaze: memory, hope, regret, love, and the fundamental errancy at the heart of what it means to be human.
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
Research for Ethnography Projects
HW for Friday: 5-7 Photo Essay with Thesis, topic sentence, and conclusion captions
For Wednesday: have Read ONE BIG SELF and be ready to discuss.
A few reminders as we move forward with your projects:
Keep in mind, 1) that scholarly articles are just one part of the research activities you will be doing for your ethnographic writing projects, and 2) in our reading so far, you have likely already encountered ideas, arguments, and examples you can use in your analysis of a Symbolic Action. **I want to remind you that IF you can make a connection between something Rebekah Nathan, for instance, writes about (an example she uses, an argument she makes,) and your own subject-matter, then you can and are encouraged to use Nathan as a source for your project. The great advantage of this is that when you use a source this way, you are already using it Originally and for your own purposes!
1. Looking at your project proposals, take five minutes and think back about the essays we've read over the last two weeks. Brainstorm connections you might make between what you plan to study and what you've already read. How do these articles provide a background or a foundation for your project?
2. Now, take 5 more minutes to brainstorm what further research questions that you have. What are you looking for that you think other scholars might have addressed?
3.Searching: You want to find out if there are other ethnographic studies that consider your topic. If so, these will be valuable to find. Using a variety of search terms, search through the contents of Ethnography Journal. Also try Project Muse, JSTOR, Google Scholar, and any other databases in the HUMANITIES. You might also try Academic Search Premier.
4. Ultimately, you want to consider as many sources as possible, and then have the opportunity to choose the BEST sources.
5. Requirements: I am requiring that you use at least 2 sources we've considered in class, and at least 2 SCHOLARLY sources that you find on your own. (You may consider more than this. Also, b/c I'm requiring that you use relatively FEW SOURCES, these sources should be WELL CHOSEN) Keep in mind, you can use these sources for a variety of purposes, including as BACKGROUND info, STATISTICAL ANALYSIS (if the article offers stats pertinent to your project), EVIDENCE of your claims about your subject. You can even attempt to apply the argument of one source to your own topic: For instance, you might seek to APPLY how Rebekah Nathan focuses the idea of FUN in college life to your own study of how college students greet each other at WESTFIELD STATE.
6. DUE DATES: On APRIL 29, you will turn in a 3-4 page write-up that summarizes all of your scholarly sources (from in class and from outside of class) and also explains how you plan to use these sources in your Ethnographic writing paper.
7. MORE DUE DATES:
5/2 - 5/4 Initial Draft Due: (CONFERENCES) this draft will incorporate your Field Research with your research into sources.
5/6: Revised draft due.
5/9: Final draft due.
*We'll come back to the computer lab on W 4/27*
blog: http://faufreshman.blogspot.com/2007/09/college-social-life-1101.html
http://www.pineforge.com/oswcondensed/study/articles/07/Stuber.pdf
Diffusion of Responsibility in a Nonemergency Situation: Response to a Greeting from a Stranger.
For Wednesday: have Read ONE BIG SELF and be ready to discuss.
A few reminders as we move forward with your projects:
Keep in mind, 1) that scholarly articles are just one part of the research activities you will be doing for your ethnographic writing projects, and 2) in our reading so far, you have likely already encountered ideas, arguments, and examples you can use in your analysis of a Symbolic Action. **I want to remind you that IF you can make a connection between something Rebekah Nathan, for instance, writes about (an example she uses, an argument she makes,) and your own subject-matter, then you can and are encouraged to use Nathan as a source for your project. The great advantage of this is that when you use a source this way, you are already using it Originally and for your own purposes!
1. Looking at your project proposals, take five minutes and think back about the essays we've read over the last two weeks. Brainstorm connections you might make between what you plan to study and what you've already read. How do these articles provide a background or a foundation for your project?
2. Now, take 5 more minutes to brainstorm what further research questions that you have. What are you looking for that you think other scholars might have addressed?
3.Searching: You want to find out if there are other ethnographic studies that consider your topic. If so, these will be valuable to find. Using a variety of search terms, search through the contents of Ethnography Journal. Also try Project Muse, JSTOR, Google Scholar, and any other databases in the HUMANITIES. You might also try Academic Search Premier.
4. Ultimately, you want to consider as many sources as possible, and then have the opportunity to choose the BEST sources.
5. Requirements: I am requiring that you use at least 2 sources we've considered in class, and at least 2 SCHOLARLY sources that you find on your own. (You may consider more than this. Also, b/c I'm requiring that you use relatively FEW SOURCES, these sources should be WELL CHOSEN) Keep in mind, you can use these sources for a variety of purposes, including as BACKGROUND info, STATISTICAL ANALYSIS (if the article offers stats pertinent to your project), EVIDENCE of your claims about your subject. You can even attempt to apply the argument of one source to your own topic: For instance, you might seek to APPLY how Rebekah Nathan focuses the idea of FUN in college life to your own study of how college students greet each other at WESTFIELD STATE.
6. DUE DATES: On APRIL 29, you will turn in a 3-4 page write-up that summarizes all of your scholarly sources (from in class and from outside of class) and also explains how you plan to use these sources in your Ethnographic writing paper.
7. MORE DUE DATES:
5/2 - 5/4 Initial Draft Due: (CONFERENCES) this draft will incorporate your Field Research with your research into sources.
5/6: Revised draft due.
5/9: Final draft due.
*We'll come back to the computer lab on W 4/27*
blog: http://faufreshman.blogspot.com/2007/09/college-social-life-1101.html
http://www.pineforge.com/oswcondensed/study/articles/07/Stuber.pdf
Diffusion of Responsibility in a Nonemergency Situation: Response to a Greeting from a Stranger.
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