Monthly Archives: October 2008

Welcome!

Why memory, narrative and community?
The interaction between history and memory generates ongoing intellectual controversy and public debate. These debates are particularly relevant to the politics of displacement and marginalization. This course, offered Fall 2008, examined memory, narrative, and history in relation to contemporary cultural and political forces. It explored how individuals and social groups construct versions of the past through active engagement with history. What are the limits and possibilities of remembering and of forgetting? What are the processes by which official versions of the past come into circulation and have material effects as opposed to unofficial, or subjugated, versions? Students engaged in meaningful, collaborative projects that used memory to investigate experiences of displacement and marginalization but also to counteract such processes. In addition to developing skills of interviewing, transcribing, and analyzing, all of the students decided to create final capstone digital ethnographic stories

Capstone Course Principles and Objectives
As a capstone course, “Memory, Narrative, Community” met the Department of Anthropology’s requirements for a culminating senior experience. The course proposal fulfilled criteria in the following areas: 1) holism; 2) engagement and activism; 3) practical skills; and 4) change. Furthermore, the course provoked explicit critique of the forces that shape contemporary society. Assignments and the final project provided hands-on experiences to examine and challenge these forces as they manifest locally. As such, the course embraced core principles that aim to help students grasp complex meanings and practices that play out across generational, racial/ethnic, gender- and class-based differences.

1) Holism
The course required students to choose from biocultural, historical, materialist, linguistic, and sociocultural approaches to investigate the politics of displacement and marginalization. Students were encouraged to draw on multiple perspectives as they pursued their projects and discovered the power of social memory to make sense of contemporary cultural dynamics.

2) Engagement and activism
The course served as a platform for student engagement and as such engaged students in the relevance of memory to cultural politics and to discover ways to challenge processes of displacement. Concrete examples of the role of the past in the present, in relation to displacement and marginalization, stimulated ideas about a local project that so as to empower students to transform intellectual pursuits into political engagement and to become co-constructors of new narratives designed to stimulate positive social change.

3) Practical skills
The primary course objective is to devise a project that serves not only as a vehicle for student learning but also as scholarship that engages community and promotes social justice. The results have been uploaded onto this course blog. In addition to learning about the value of oral history and social memory, students attained a number of skills including: a) recognizing past-present connections that people make and motivations that people have for drawing on the past to illuminate the present; b) methodologies including participant observation, interviewing, recording interviews, transcribing interviews, accessing local databases, archives, and libraries, as well as developing critical thinking skills; and c) practice compiling reports, documents, and testimonies, as well as conducting analyses and writing for multiple audiences, all skills which may be useful for advocacy work or local organizations.

4) Explicit objective of changing something
In the first two weeks of class students, together with the instructor, identified major issues of displacement or marginalization on campus and in the Pioneer Valley area that demands attention. The students designed interrelated yet individual projects that to document the displacement and, ideally, resistance to that displacement. An end-product served as a means for raising awareness in the community and stimulating change or at least a plan of action for change. Going into the course, possible topics related to displacement or marginalization included social justice issues connected to education “reform,” economic restructuring that results in unemployment of workers in a given sector or the arrival of immigrant laborers, or other populations who are being or have been marginalized due to issues connected to race, gender/sexuality, class, etc. Actual project themes included “alternative history,” “sexuality,” “agriculture,” and “crisis.”

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