What are the details of our daily existence? What systems dominate our lives? What meanings can we make of our situation?

This social studies/humanities course will steal from various disciplines - including anthropology, critical theory, cultural studies, economics, futurology, history, philosophy, political science, psychology, and sociology - to help us make sense of our situation.

A major goal of the course will be to focus your attention on your own life. Together we will investigate major systems that create and rule our lives including capitalism, school, family, popular culture, and the US government. And we will figure out how to interpret our lives, and these systems, and the collision of our lives and these systems.

We will detour into the future and the past but our journey will be primarily contemporary.

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Where We're At Right Now

The Syllabus:
Unit 1 - Digital completed.
Unit 2 - Cool - We're finishing phase 4 (integration) - all that's left is the art project. We will finish the unit around the end of the semester.
Units 3 (School) and 4 (Other People) still planned and on schedule.

Assignments:
There will be no additional required assignments over the break. An extra credit opportunity appears below.
The paper - which will be an exhibition-style integration of what you've learned about coolness in 5-10 pages - will be due in rough draft form around January 13 - feel free to get a head start. The art project will also be similar to the assignment in the Digital Unit - so you can also start thinking about what you want to do with it (Four Tet on Being Popular on Youtube could be a model).

Grades:
Assignments 21-25 have been completely graded for all sections and (extremely late by now) new versions of that work will not be graded.
Assignments 26-29 have been completely graded for section 1, 2, 3, and 4.
All sections have been graded. If you didn't have 37 posted I used 35 (or if that was missing 34). Grades available Tuesday.
Extra credit must be completed by the first day back to school, 4th of January.
I will update this part of this post as I complete each section of grades.


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