For your final exploratory assignment, I invite you to work in pairs to create a schema of theories/theorists/issues/ideas/concepts on our syllabus—towards the goal of being able to place Baudrillard, Vasaly, and Miller in a way that is satisfactory to you. As a reminder, a “schema” is more commonly known as a formal structure, which shows how things are organized in relation to one another or are arranged in relation to the world.
As before, this is more generative than demonstrative. Feel free to play. In other words, consider how you might present our syllabus as a hierarchy of concerns, and make it clear how our final week of readings fits into that hierarchy. You might do this by historical moments, by schools of thought, by disciplinary problems, by rhetorical questions, by theoretical approaches, by time, by philosophical figures, or by some other guiding principle. But also, you might consider the various and potential outcomes of such a reorganization of our syllabus, and in fact you may decide that the syllabus is best schematized according to theoretical questions or learning outcomes, or even questions raised by individual texts. The overarching logic to your scheme is truly up for negotiation; ultimately you want us to have a visual sense of how you might re/relate some of our conversations, issues, and texts, and you should feel quite free to break away from the "ideas" as they have been somewhat inscribed according to the titles heading each week.
Please do not spend more time than you need to on this. It should provide a moment of synthesis, and an opportunity for you to place our final (challenging) texts in a way that makes sense to your group.
As a reminder, most schemas combine the visual and the textual, and sometimes they look like trees, database structures, venn diagrams, charts, or architectural drawings. You have absolute creative license in terms of how you will compose your schema. In fact, you may make it as layered as you would like—topographic, even!—if you think a multi-dimensional map would better demonstrate the the relationships between them. Your schema will likely need some prose explanation (perhaps even selective quoting), as well as a symbol key or a guide.
I'll suggest the following working teams (trying to spread around opportunities to work in three-somes):
- Abe and Erin
- Ashley, Jason, and Jenn
- Kendall and Sarah
- Kyle, Megan K., and Megan R.
Please upload your completed schema to our shared Google Drive space by the beginning of class time on Tuesday, November 19, and bring a hard copy to class for our discussion (just in case).
For your follow-up critical blog post (which you will do individually), please reflect on the schema assignment and how some aspect of the task illumined/complicated/addressed/extended your reading of our texts for this week. As before, this critical blog post is somewhat formal, rather than a simple reflection. It should be a minimum of 2-3 well developed paragraphs in length (a couple of screens), and I'll be interested in having you justify why you constructed a schema in order to place Baudrillard, Vasaly, and Miller where you have, so it won't be odd to spend most of the post addressing that question, but you should also feel free to use your post to address and explain your overarching logic, as well.
Be sure to define terms and unpack assumptions for us, using your posts as occasions to teach. Because the blog is somewhat performative, I'll ask you to title your posts creatively (or insightfully). Feel free to compose your post as a response to someone else’s, if you see an interesting conversation starting on the blog.
To take the edge off of next week, let's make the critical blog post due by 2:00 p.m. Thursday, November 21 -- giving you an additional 48 hours to reflect.
Yes, this is our final push!
