6916:about_this_seminar
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- | # About this seminar | ||
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- | Welcome to *Development and culture: Key concepts*, a seminar covering the foundational theories of society and culture. This class was developed to serve as a required unit in theory for students of development and has since grown into an all-purpose survey of theories of society. As I am a social and cultural anthropologist, | ||
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- | Like many classes at the postgraduate level, this class is organized as a seminar, and thus centers on an open discussion among students. I provide guidance to the discussion. I will not, however, give any lectures in this class.[^rec] Each week we will come together to help each other understand a set of readings better. Each week's readings represent the work of one important scholar whose ideas have influenced the way people in many social sciences formulate and seek to answer questions about social life. Our job is to find out all the different ways that these ideas can be interpreted and applied. This means we all have to contribute something to the discussion each week, so that we discover as many different perspectives as possible.[^incl] | ||
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- | Indeed, in many cases we will be reading the original works of these key thinkers. Since their work is foundational, | ||
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- | Our job in this class is to enter into this kind of discussion, and thus become part of this scholarly community ourselves. Every week, we will know if we have done a good job if: | ||
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- | (1) students have done most of the talking, and | ||
- | (2) everyone in the class has had a chance to ask questions and | ||
- | contribute their ideas. | ||
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- | Your participation in discussion is, in that sense, something you do for your fellow students. By offering your views, especially to people who disagree with you, you help them to reflect critically on their own reasoning. Likewise, when you seek out the perspectives of other people, you are able to become aware of your own thought processes. This is ultimately what you will take away from this class: an understanding of your own perspective, | ||
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- | *** | ||
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- | Many students are unfamiliar or uncomfortable with speaking in public, or with participating in a class discussion. Discussion is important to this class, and it is a part of your grade, but I am not assuming that it will come easy to everyone. What I expect is that each person try their best, and keep trying. | ||
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- | What you can expect from me and from your fellow students is that we will all help make the class comfortable and welcoming to everyone' | ||
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- | To help each student prepare for their participation in class discussion, each week you will submit a short reflection on an open question about the week's topic. While each of these are graded, they are not meant to be tests and the questions do not have a single right answer. You receive points for doing a good, thorough job of reflecting on your own ideas and elaborating them in a paragraph or two. If you write in complete sentences and show that you have put some effort into developing your thinking (for example, by citing relevant information in the week's reading and including a correct reference), you will be doing well. You have space to go out on a limb and say something that you are not entirely sure about. | ||
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- | To make sure that everyone has a chance to take the floor, students will take turns leading the discussion each week. Each student will sign up to get the ball rolling on the discussion with a five-minute presentation, | ||
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- | Our discussions in class will also help prepare you to develop arguments about social theory and its application to social analysis. Your first major assignment is an essay of 2000 words in which you analyze the theoretical perspective underlying a scholar' | ||
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- | [^rec]: And since there are no lectures, there are also no lecture | ||
- | recordings for this class either. | ||
- | [^incl]: But see below. | ||
6916/about_this_seminar.1532048173.txt.gz · Last modified: 2018/07/19 17:56 by Ryan Schram (user)