Spring 2021 - SA 887 G100
Special Topics in Sociology/Anthropology (5)
Class Number: 3214
Delivery Method: In Person
Overview
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Course Times + Location:
Jan 11 – Apr 16, 2021: Tue, 5:30–9:20 p.m.
Burnaby
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Instructor:
Dara Culhane
culhane@sfu.ca
Office Hours: By appointment -
Instructor:
Peter Dickinson
ped@sfu.ca
1 778 782-9912
Description
CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:
An advanced seminar devoted to an in-depth examination of a topic not regularly offered by the department.
COURSE DETAILS:
Performance, as an object of study and a method of critical research and analysis, has increasingly become a way to bridge scholarly inquiry across the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Among other things, this has meant paying attention to how the body and the senses produce knowledge and ways of being in the world. This practice-based course is co-taught by performance studies scholars in Anthropology and Contemporary Arts. We will explore the theoretical and methodological intersections among performance studies and two emerging fields in anthropology: multisensory ethnography, which explores relationships between embodied sensory experience and historical, cultural, and political contexts; and multimodal ethnography, which engages media in conducting fieldwork, and in analyzing and communicating ethnographic work.
As both performance studies and ethnography speak meaningfully to our relationships to place, and how we embody and are entangled with different material spaces, we will take as our primary objects of study our immediate sensory environments. Given the current circumstances of our global pandemic, these environments will be multiple and varied, and potentially very radically circumscribed. Nevertheless, we will engage with a range of sensory studies (texts, films, material archives) exemplary of researchers’ sensuous, performative, and often practice-based entanglements with the multiple and overlapping worlds they embody, including the scholarly, the artistic, the activist, and the community-engaged. We will also use two methods that derive from (and also cross over) anthropology and performance—namely, keeping an ethnographic diary/field notebook and developing and working with improvisatory scores—in order to “make sense” of our place-based investigations. These methods will, in turn, seed students’ final projects.
Grading
- Multisensory Ethnographic Diary 30%
- Canvas Discussion Contributions 10%
- Project Proposal 10%
- Project reading list & shared score 10%
- Final Project 40%
Materials
REQUIRED READING:
All readings will be available through Canvas, the SFU Library, or otherwise online as noted.
Graduate Studies Notes:
Important dates and deadlines for graduate students are found here: http://www.sfu.ca/dean-gradstudies/current/important_dates/guidelines.html. The deadline to drop a course with a 100% refund is the end of week 2. The deadline to drop with no notation on your transcript is the end of week 3.
Registrar Notes:
ACADEMIC INTEGRITY: YOUR WORK, YOUR SUCCESS
SFU’s Academic Integrity web site http://www.sfu.ca/students/academicintegrity.html is filled with information on what is meant by academic dishonesty, where you can find resources to help with your studies and the consequences of cheating. Check out the site for more information and videos that help explain the issues in plain English.
Each student is responsible for his or her conduct as it affects the University community. Academic dishonesty, in whatever form, is ultimately destructive of the values of the University. Furthermore, it is unfair and discouraging to the majority of students who pursue their studies honestly. Scholarly integrity is required of all members of the University. http://www.sfu.ca/policies/gazette/student/s10-01.html
TEACHING AT SFU IN SPRING 2021
Teaching at SFU in spring 2021 will be conducted primarily through remote methods. There will be in-person course components in a few exceptional cases where this is fundamental to the educational goals of the course. Such course components will be clearly identified at registration, as will course components that will be “live” (synchronous) vs. at your own pace (asynchronous). Enrollment acknowledges that remote study may entail different modes of learning, interaction with your instructor, and ways of getting feedback on your work than may be the case for in-person classes. To ensure you can access all course materials, we recommend you have access to a computer with a microphone and camera, and the internet. In some cases your instructor may use Zoom or other means requiring a camera and microphone to invigilate exams. If proctoring software will be used, this will be confirmed in the first week of class.
Students with hidden or visible disabilities who believe they may need class or exam accommodations, including in the current context of remote learning, are encouraged to register with the SFU Centre for Accessible Learning (caladmin@sfu.ca or 778-782-3112).