LATEST PROJECTS
Project | 01
Assignment #1 - Voices for Publics
In this first assignment, the goal is to have you engage with issues of voice (to build on ideas from Units 1 and 2) and to create two different and contrasting formats of writing crafted for a public audience. Your writing will draw from your experience with a chosen non-traditional or unpopular voice, and will synthesize ideas and concepts you have gained in lecture, section discussion, and readings that pertain to this first part of the course.
Project | 02
Section Unit 2 - Creating Voices
This section activity is a two-part assignment. The first part is a thought exercise and should take about 15 minutes. The second part is creative and may take a couple of hours.
Link to the creative portion here.
Project | 03
Section Unit 3 - Mapping Ourselves
Our Section Activity this week provides us some time and space for reflection. Plus, in efforts to ground our knowledge in career applications, we will also spend time applying foundations of voice explored so far to create our own representations of self.
Project | 04
Section Unit 4 - (De)Constructing Voices
The idea behind this unit’s activity is to both engage you with different formats of storytelling and expose you to ways of making your own digital stories. You will get to work on this activity in small team collaborations. The first part asks you to collectively engage with a media text of your team’s choosing. The second part asks your team to plan, film, and edit a video. You should plan on spending around one or two hours working on the second half of the assignment. You then will edit your recorded conversation to tell a 6-minute story about your group’s interaction with the media text.
Project | 05
Section Unit 5 - Ethnographic Exercise
For this week, you will write an ethnography by observing, recording, and describing the cultural environment and social practices of the classical singer. When you draft your mini-ethnography, you should work within the limits of 2-2.5 pages (using standard margins, 12-point font, and double-spaced). Your final product should be around 750-1000 words.
Project | 06
Section Unit 6 - Listening Journal
For this week’s section, you are to pick an example of a vocal, or sung piece music that you never tend to listen to, or that you don’t encounter frequently. A good way to think about this is to consider a genre of music you don’t really know—it could popular or not, old or contemporary, American or other. Push yourself to select something really out of your comfort zone. Do a quick search online, or using whatever music access programs you tend to frequent, pick one song as an example. Make sure your example features the voice in some way.
Project | 07
Section Unit 7 - Mapping Ourselves Pt. II
Our Section Activity this week provides us some time and space for reflection. Plus, in efforts to ground our knowledge in career applications, we will also spend time applying foundations of voice explored in the recent segments our course, to our own representations of self. Now that you have launched your Assignment 2, met and worked with your partner (at least in initial phases of choosing a sight and planning your research), please take a moment (5-10 minutes) to jot down some reflections about this collaborative process.
Project | 08
Assignment #2 - Multitude of Mediated Voices (Starbucks coffee shop w/Zhan)
You will work with a partner (assigned by instructors from your section), and your first task will be to collectively find a location in which both of you can listen to and interact with many forms of voices. The point here is to work as a team, and contribute ideas to the larger conception of your paper. That will form a basis of how you will draft your essay. Then, each of you will go forward and write up, shape, polish, and edit your own final product. Each of your own writing styles and individual ideas will make each product unique. That being said, each of your essays can and likely will sound similar and use same information and concepts that both of you identified as critical foundation for your essay.
Project | 9
Section Unit 8 - Identifying Voices
All quarter we have explored how voice is metaphorical and critically embedded within the social and cultural fabrics from which a vocal sound emerges (spoken, sung, and anything in between). In this Unit, both your readings and lectures have prepared you to critically understand how voices—in the complex process of sounding—carry meanings that we often associate with markers of identity. From this exercise, select one aspect of a voice or a vocal situation that had significance for you. Relate that moment to an idea, concept, or process of analysis that you learnt this week from readings and from lecture that dealt with voice and identity. Write this observation up in a paragraph (blog-post length) for your e-portfolio and post it in time for your section.
Project | 10
Section Unit 9 - Exploring Worlds
This unit will help pivot the conversation from gathering knowledge about voice to activating your own voice. This week's exercise helps to center the conversation around you as students and help build your academic/career "roadmaps". The term "worlds" will be used throughout this exercise as a geographical metaphor to refer to "cultural knowledge and behavior found within different spaces occupied.
After thinking through the above questions, write 1-2 paragraphs about the parts of the survey that you found most significant and helpful.
Project | 11
Section Unit 10 - E-Portfolios
In your last section activity, we want you to take stock of your course accomplishments by writing a short reflective post on your e-portfolio that considers what you think was your most productive exercise (whether in terms of writing, of designing, or collaborating, or critically analyzing) that you did this quarter. Please write 1-2 paragraphs that describes this activity, what it did for you, and how you imagine you might carry its lessons going forward.