SoleJourney / Project 1 draft due

Your revised draft of Project 1 is due to Catherine and me by the start of next class. Per my earlier instructions: Each of you should be submitting at least one Word document: i.e., your revised 500-word reflection on your project. However, as to the project itself, many of you are working in media other than print: you’re creating videos, photo-essays, graphic novels, etc. If you’re one of these people, you’ll want to turn your project draft in by (a) finding the appropriate website for posting your kind of media; (b) posting your draft there; and (c) sending me and Catherine a link to the work you’ve posted. For example, if you’ve created a video, you might post it to YouTube; if you’ve created a collage, you might photograph it and post it to Flickr; if you’re creating a radio play, you might post it on archive.org. If you don’t know of a site that hosts the kind of work that you’re doing, please email me ASAP, and I'll tell you where to go.

(A reminder: After Catherine and I read/view/listen/play your project draft, we'll write back with suggestions for revision. The key word here is that last one: revision. You'll revise your project again before submitting it for a final grade at the end of the course.)

2. Please read Inventing Human Rights, Chapter 4: "'There will be no end of it:' The Consequences of Declaring,"and please watch the documentary film SoleJourney, by Kate Burns and Sheila E. Schroeder (available on DU CourseMedia). One of the filmmakers, Kate Burns, is coming to our to class on Tuesday. I think you'll be really interested to talk with Kate, both because her film is so interesting and because Kate will be teaching your SJUS class in the spring.

3. Please send Catherine and me a 1-paragraph response to this question: How can we see the events depicted in SoleJourney as a synecdoche for a larger social structure or historical trend (i.e., of what larger wholes are these events a representative part)? And how does the film serve to ironically subvert, undermine, or otherwise cause us to question the conventional understanding of these larger social and/or historical wholes? It'll really be great to use your responses as the basis of discussion when When Kate visits class; so please deploy all of your considerable brain power to develop a keen and insightful response to the question. A good way to come up with a keen, insightful response is by drawing upon the Inventing Human Rights to help you.