This class website will be our home-base. Here you’ll find our most up-to-date schedule, all course reading / screening material (some of which is password-protected), links to slides, and daily agendas with links to the various platforms we’ll use during our synchronous meetings and asynchronous interactions. Those platforms include:
- Notion: we’ll use Notion, a knowledge + productivity management platform, as a repository for our Concept Library, our fieldnotes, and confidential documents; as a hub for planning our fieldwork; and as a space for resource sharing and informal conversation
- Zoom: we’ll use this video teleconferencing platform for those real-time full-class meetings when we meet with external guests (who are not permitted to join us on-campus this semester), for one-on-one conversations, and perhaps for other purposes as needed.
- Google Drive, Docs, and Slides: I’ll be saving our private docs and recorded lectures to Google Drive, creating interactive class agendas on Google Docs, and sharing my presentations via Google Slides. You’ll be submitting some assignments via Google Drive, too.
- Mural: this digital whiteboard will allow us to engage in multimedia concept-mapping and fieldnote coding, and could prove useful for communication within small groups.
- Others: we might use Flipgrid, Hypothesis, Perusall, Voicethread, Twitter, Mozilla Hubs, OpenProject, or other tools if opportunities present themselves.
** To access password-protected readings, you’ll be prompted to enter the user name <___> and password <__>. Not so secret, eh?
A few notes about the weekly readings/screenings/listening exercises:
- I think we can better appreciate the complexity, relevance, and resonance of each of our weekly themes by approaching them from multiple theoretical, historical, practical, and creative directions. That’s why, for each week, I’ve put together a mini “anthology” rather than assigning a single definitive text. Yes, sometimes those reading lists might look intimidatingly long – but the total number of pages hardly ever exceeds 100 (and a lot of those pages are illustrated!), and sometimes I substitute videos or podcasts to written texts, which ultimately makes for a reasonable workload. Plus, each text on that list is there because it has the potential to add a distinctive voice to our conversation.
- My selection of a particular text doesn’t constitute an endorsement of it. Sometimes I choose texts that annoy me, or with which I disagree, for a few reasons: because they’re widely cited and I think it’d behoove you to be aware of them, because I want to allow you to exercise your own judgment, and because I’m pretty sure they’ll make for good conversation. In short: you’re not compelled to agree with everything you read!
- We will not address all the readings in our in-class discussions. Some readings are primarily factual, some are self-explanatory, some simply present interesting illustrations or case studies; we needn’t discuss these sorts of texts in-depth – but they’re still worth your time! They provide valuable nuance and color that will inform our discussions, shape your own understanding, and, ideally, inspire ideas for your own projects.
- I was unfortunately unable to find many illustrative case studies from or about the Global South, or that exemplified anti-racist or anti-colonial principles. I hope we can take the lack of explicit attention to these issues as inspiration to infuse such principles into our own work – as critical lenses in our observation and analysis and as operating values in our ways of working together.