• Participation: Students are expected to do weekly readings regularly and comprehensively, and contribute to seminar discussions.

• Short response papers: In the first half of the semester prior to the spring break, every week we will be writing a series of short (2-3 page) papers, responding to the past week's discussions. These papers will be posted on the wiki in order to create a substantial record of our ideas from many points of view, and to continue discussion beyond the classroom.

• Shared reading load: Each student will also have a chance to make brief presentatations of selected articles.

• Logbook: You will be asked to keep a logbook throughout the semester, as an intimate documentation of your ideas, thoughts, projects, visual imagery that this class had provoked in your mind. The logbook will be an accumulated product of the whole semester's work of note-taking, writing, sketching, drawing, cutting-pasting etc, using any kind of media. It will be your own design, your own work of art. The format is open. It could be a hardbound notebook which you can carry oround with you everywhere, or it could be a digital product, a blog, or a wiki.
  • Reading: Te Heesen, A.; 2005. "Download
    ViewThe notebook: A paper technology" in Making Things Public. Atmospheres of Democracy. B Latour and P Weibel (eds) The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 582-589.

• Research project: In the second half of the semester, students will focus on a collaborative research project. The reserach and presentation process involves 2 phases. The first phase involves a group project (2-3 students in each group, depending on our class size), which will result in a presentation (April 24) and a research-wiki page, and the second phase is an 8-10 page final paper which are individualized, but essentially derives from the group project. (Graduate students will write 12-20 page papers). Each group project should be oriented towards one of the major theoretical themes of the class (object biographies, fetish, agency, ethnography of space and place, technology, etc) and should investigate a coherent body of archaeological or ethnographic material.

• There really are no exams.

• Grading will be based on class participation (20%), response papers (20%), logbook (15%), group project (20%), final paper (25%).

Go back to Main Page.