Below is a table showing the grade you received on your final test.  The percentage that follows should give you a rough idea of how well you’re doing in the course right now (it is a cumulative percentage).  Remember that your final project is worth 30% so you can pretty seriously raise or lower that grade.  The class average right now is 76%.

392900:    17.5    85%
1019833:    16    88%
1049893:    0    61%
1054297:    17.5    92%
1108217:    0    20%
1114692:    10.5    82%
1119559:    18.5    92%
1121436:    15.5    81%
1132712:    14.5    83%
1143385:    17    86%
1144270:    15    74%
1148494:    13    72%
1150170:    10    77%
1151848:    19.5    99%
1152278:    15    82%
1153793:    17    84%
1155920:    10    53%
1163040:    15    85%
1168610:   14    80%
1170594:    9    64%
1172253:   10.5    46%
1174619:    13    79%
1175308:    12.5    78%
1175381:    13.5    75%
1176908:    10    64%
1178184:    7    61%
1179506:    17    88%
1184908:    12.5    76%
1200101:    16.5    86%
1210960:    18.5    93%
1217756:    12    78%

Friday April 3, 2009: Final Test: 20%

This in-class, closed book test will focus primarily on Storey’s Cultural theory and popular culture text.  You will also be tested on general knowledge of Taussig and specific knowledge of one chapter from Edwards.  See below for details about the specific chapters and sections that you will be tested on:

• Cultural theory and popular culture:
  • Ch. 4. Marxisms
  • Ch. 7. Gender and Sexuality
  • Ch. 8. Postmodernism
• Law in a lawless land: Diary of a limpieza in Colombia
  • Author’s note
  • The First Week
  • A view from the outside
• Photography: A Very Short Introduction.
  • Chapter 2: “Documents”

Final Project

Your final project will be due on Friday, April 24th.  You need to hand these in to the main sociology office (5-21 HM Tory building before the office closes at 4pm).

I commented on the last assignment (Major Scrapbook Assignment) today. My main concern was to tell you all that I’ll be grading this more critically and carefully than the minor scrapbook assignments. This means that I’ll be looking for more nuance and critique in your work. You should be writing careful, well argued and coherent papers. I’ll be looking for the quality of references that you use and the degree to which they are appropriately deployed.

I showed a clip from a lecture given by Liz Wells in 2006.

Liz Wells
Landscape, Geography and Topographical Photography
51:51
GMRC Lecture Series Free
Recorded on March 27, 2006.

>> Link to iTunes to download (free)

Cut-ups and collage are approached in this project (and have been approached in the scrapbooking project) as a way of making the familiar strange.  As the American writer and critic Greil Marcus said in an interview:

“I always hope that people will find what I do interesting and that it will spark questions of their own. If my writing has any goal it is to show that the world is more interesting than we sometimes think it is and that it is more full of contingency and doubt” (interview, Dec. 18, 2007).

For cultural studies and analysis that can be taken as a challenge to consider the limits of our techniques for looking (observing), comprehending, and representing.  You are encouraged to engage with cut-ups and collage as a way improving your skills as a cultural analyst or critic.

In this studio class you will have the opportunity to work on a collage/cut-up.  The piece you work on is up to you but keep in mind that I have been asking you to focus your scrapbook work so far on observation and social environments.  Extending your last scrapbook entry would be good.  Alternatively you could use this as a chance to explore your final scrapbook assignment.  You could also do something completely different (say work on a question of subjectivity, think about a particular built environment, or you could look at a found object or image).  You will be using the cut-up as a mode of inquiry and will come away at the end of the studio class with a tabloid-sized collage.

When: Monday, March 2nd. (9am – 10am)
Where: HUB mall, ground level Art Studio (Studio 3, room 154).
What you need:

• Necessary
  • scissors (and/or a scalpel or knife)
  • glue stick
• Optional
  • scrabooking embellishments
  • magazines
  • better quality paper
  • old shoe, bit of wool, dead ant, bird wing, quart of milk, cutting of human hair, the last breath of a dying rat, sparkle from a unicorn’s eye, etc.

resources:

• William Burroughs on cut-ups

March 2 – 6:

• Storey: chapter 6 (structuralism and post-structuralism)
• Edwards: chapter 6 (fantasy and remembrance)

March 9-13:

• Storey: chapter 7 (feminism)
• Storey: chapter 8 (postmodernism)

March16 – 20:

• Storey: chapter 9 (politics of the popular)
• Taussig: Law in a lawless land

March 23 – 27:

• Taussig: Law in a lawless land

March 30 – April 3:

• Taussig: Law in a lawless land

Hey all, sorry about the SNAFU this morning. I returned from Texas and came down with a nasty bit of food poisoning. In my delirium I asked the department of sociology to post a notice that class would be canceled for 9:30, not 9am. Any how please accept my most humble apologies.

All will be back to normal on Wednesday. See you then.

-Craig

Update. Scrapbook entry #3 is now due on the 27th of February.

After class today I came across this article in the New York Times about the “Dissonant undertones” of M.I.A.s songs. While the author has obviously little capacity to sympathize with ‘terrorists’ there is a pretty reasonable coverage of the conflict between the Sinhalese majority and Tamil minority. It certainly lights up our discussion of the ‘culture industry’.

see also this video: Delon diss’ MIA

This will be a good point to talk about remix and resistance.

Photo-Study (30%)

Due last day of examination period:

You will select and generate a research topic of your choosing that makes explicit use of photography.  The subject is open as is the way that you use the photographs.  The written portion should be between five and ten pages (1.5 pacing, 11 or 12pt. font) the visual portion can take the form of a scrapbook, a photo album, a slide show, a web page, etc.  You are encouraged to build on the work that you have begun with any of the previous scrapbooking projects but you are not required to do this.

You need to consult with me on this assignment (email or hand in a proposal by March 2nd).

References should follow the APA or MLA styles (the main thing is that you are consistent in the style that you use).  See this website for more details:

http://library.concordia.ca/help/howto/citations.html#mla

re-photography assignment (an exploration of everyday spaces)
Due: March 16
Value: 25%

In Steve Edwards’ book we learn that photography is a complex set of social and technical interactions that has had a revolutionary impact on the way that people interact with one another and with the world in general; taking a picture is never a simple act of snapping the shutter.  In this assignment you are asked to reflect not only on the act of taking a picture but also on the act of taking a picture over again.  The practice of taking a picture that has already been taken is called repeat photography or simply re-photography.  Repeat photography is not only a way of thinking about photography (and photographic histories, gazes, etc.) but it can also be a powerful technique in the analysis ‘place’ and its social construction.

In this course we take photography as one of the key technologies for representing the world today.  It is a transformative but it is also continuously being negotiated.  One thing we can say about photography with some certainty is that the photographs most definitive quality is its indexicality, the way that it points to the absolutely specific and particular.  In this specificity, the photograph reproduces and reconfigures our experience of time and place.  In this assignment we are concerned particularly with place and with the way that places are made meaningful by everyday patterns of use, misuse, and disuse.

What you need to do:

• Find a public area — a space where people gather or pass through.  Winston Churchill square, Whyte avenue, the local 7-11, etc.
• Find an historic photograph (one that is more than twenty years old).
• Produce a visual exploration of the ‘scene’ or the place.  Using your experience from scrapbook assignments 1 – 3 you need to go into this site of everyday experience with your camera as a supplement to your vision.
• Try to reproduce the photograph you have found.
  • For the scrapbook you may also consider extending your study of the place you have chosen with more photographs. (could be more detailed, more specific, could be pictures of trash, or the sidewalk, or a detailed picture of a storefront window.
• Map the site in google maps and upload both the original photograph and the photograph that you have taken to reproduce it.
• Take care not to shoot identifying shots of people in the picture.  We will share these in class (you will work in small groups to present what you have and try to imaging other ways of representing your site.).
• You will be graded on the following:
  • 1. Two photographs and a 200-300 word ‘caption’ on google maps
  • 2. A written study making explicit use of course materials (through references and quotations) situating your exploration and ‘analysis’ of the place.  This should bebetween 1000 and 1500 words.

References should follow the APA or MLA styles (the main thing is that you are consistent in the style that you use).  See this website for more details:

http://library.concordia.ca/help/howto/citations.html#mla

resources:

Smith, Trudi. 2007. Repeat Photography as a Method in Visual Anthropology. Visual Anthropology 20, no. 2/3 (March): 179-200.