Fall 2024 - CMNS 304W D100
Communication in Everyday Life (4)
Class Number: 1063
Delivery Method: In Person
Overview
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Course Times + Location:
Sep 4 – Dec 3, 2024: Fri, 2:30–5:20 p.m.
Burnaby
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Instructor:
Byron Hauck
bhauck@sfu.ca
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Prerequisites:
17 CMNS units with a minimum grade of C- or 45 units with a minimum CGPA of 2.00.
Description
CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:
An examination of a range of theories of everyday language focused on specific forms of discursive practice, including gossip, humour, religion, and sarcasm. Writing.
COURSE DETAILS:
Everyday life is made up of the activities, routines, and habits that we are most familiar with. Our own daily habits take on a veneer of normality and yet everyone’s differ slightly, from our morning rituals, use of language, and how we are addressed as ideological beings. These differences help to inform the intersections of our social positionalities, where we fit in the social systems which comprise the everyday. As you, an individual who negotiates their identity against their social position, participate in daily life: where are the easy paths, where are choices, how do we negotiate liberation from and complicity in the reproduction of current forms of social domination?
This course empowers students to reflexively engage the composition of their everyday life from theories of space and time to the social justice intersections of cultural and political economic struggles. The course is broken up into three component sections: identity and action; space; and time. The first section, identity and action, addresses the possibilities, opportunities and barriers involved in realizing one’s identity and being able to perform it in daily life. The second section, space, investigates the how material culture provides a background for the ways in which we participate in daily life. This is followed up by taking time as an analytical unit to scrutinize how social power is enacted through temporal experiences.
While this is a lecture-based course, students will be expected to have read materials before class ready to ask questions, provide general accounts, and interpretations of the readings. As the course progresses there will be more seminar discussion to provide students with the opportunity to experiment applying theory to their daily activities and inform their writing activities. Each of the three sections includes a mini writing assignment and other activities meant to help you map out and identify various components of your daily life and the choices you make in (re)producing dominate social powers that we otherwise wish to critique. The final paper consists of a theoretically informed critique of one mundane (or not) aspect of your daily life.
Class format
The course is organized as one 3-hour lecture per week, with 1-hour tutorials.
COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:
1. Awareness of oneself as an agent within wider social system and how individual practices can reproduce, critique and transform dominate power structures.
2. Familiarity with major theories of the everyday and critical approaches that confront everyday.
3. Ability to discuss the role of various forms of social power in the production of everyday life.
4. Ability to debate cultural politics, social conflicts, and resistance in concrete historical, political, cultural, and socio-economic contexts.
Grading
- Attendance & Participation (ongoing) 20%
- Positionality Paper (5 pages) 20%
- Mapping Space 2%
- Spatial Autoethnography (5 pages) 18%
- Making a Clock 2%
- Temporal Autoethnography (5 pages) 18%
- Final Research Paper (10-12 pages) 20%
Materials
REQUIRED READING:
Course readings will be made available via Canvas (the online course management system which you will be able to access starting in the first week of the semester): https://canvas.sfu.ca/
REQUIRED READING NOTES:
Your personalized Course Material list, including digital and physical textbooks, are available through the SFU Bookstore website by simply entering your Computing ID at: shop.sfu.ca/course-materials/my-personalized-course-materials.
Registrar Notes:
ACADEMIC INTEGRITY: YOUR WORK, YOUR SUCCESS
SFU’s Academic Integrity website 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
RELIGIOUS ACCOMMODATION
Students with a faith background who may need accommodations during the term are encouraged to assess their needs as soon as possible and review the Multifaith religious accommodations website. The page outlines ways they begin working toward an accommodation and ensure solutions can be reached in a timely fashion.