This semester we convened from multiple disciplines, parts of the world, and places in our individual research journeys to think capaciously (🔔🔔🔔!) about methods. You can read more about our learning goals here. We came from architectural history, art history, communication, comparative literature, computer science, English, the history of science, Japanese studies, marketing, and a variety of other fields. Some of us were advancing our dissertation research, some were initiating our doctoral studies, and several of us were just staring off in the generalist Master of Liberal Arts program and still identifying our interests. Most of our work throughout the semester involved iteratively framing our research interests and identifying what methods — not only conventional research methods, but also community engagement methods, methods of communication, methods of citation, methods of ethics-informed evaluation, and so forth — would allow us to do the work we planned to do. By the end of the semester, some of us had created syllabi that helped us map out the resources we wanted to explore in our emergent research, while also allowing us to begin framing our own pedagogical aspirations; some of us created multimodal archives of our research material; some of us developed epistemological and ethical justifications for our own bespoke methods; some of us created video essays; some of us wrote papers. And all of us supported one another through the process.
Some students have elected to share their final projects here 🙂
↑↑ Basak, an architectural history PhD student, used our class to advance her PhD research on Turkish architect Layla Turgut and to prepare for a spring seminar presentation. She explains the work eloquently in her abstract: “This research explores the life and architectural contributions of Leyla Turgut (1911-1988), a pioneering female architect in the Republic of Turkey. It investigates the fragmentation of her personal and professional identities, as well as the relative neglect of her architectural legacy. The study reconstructs the narrative of Turgut, shedding light on the ways in which her career was shaped by gender, migration, changing state borders, and national identity. I reconstruct her narrative from four archives, two built projects, and her representation in media. Additionally, I extend the research by following traces from the archive to uncover evidence not documented in the existing records. The study critically analyzes how Turgut’s gender played a role in both her architectural commissions and her archival representation as the Modern Turkish Woman. Simultaneously, it examines how her migrant identity shaped her academic and professional works. The research also questions Turgut’s attempts at self-archiving, questioning the archive itself.”
↑↑ Clare, a first-year History of Art masters student, created “Queer Philly: A Public Art History Course,” to help herself learn more about the history and present of queer art — particularly public art — in Philadelphia. And in keeping with the ethos of her research, she designed the syllabus to support a public, explore-at-your-own-pace program that could, ideally, eventually, be organized in collaboration with queer advocacy and arts organizations throughout the city.
↑↑ Dekang, a first-semester masters student, created a website that’s meant to serve as public pedagogical platform to help people understand how social media informed Gen Z’s engagement with the 2016 US presidential election.
↑↑ Elspeth, a History and Sociology of Science PhD student, created a multimodal website that allows her to “catalogue and reimagine” — through timelines, models, and speculative collages — much of the visual archival material she’s encountering through her dissertation research, which focuses on the history of data-driven breeding in the U.S. dairy industry.
↑↑ Emilie, a communication PhD student, created a thoughtful, detailed syllabus for an undergraduate class framed by André Brock’s critical technocultural discourse analysis, examining how the composite method applies in media studies and allied fields, as well as in various professional realms and across popular culture.
↑↑ Jaj, a computer scientist, digital humanist, and applied data science librarian at Penn, developed a great series of AI Literacy workshops she’ll be hosting throughout the spring semester, and she began to draft a zine that will be distributed at these events.
↑↑ Kalen, a first-semester masters student, wrote a smart paper that examined the construction of female roles and gender identity in Farewell my Concubine and A Lifelong Journey. He explains: “By adopting a historical contextualization approach, the research analyzes how these works reflect broader societal changes in gender relations and highlights the evolution of female characters over time.”
↑↑ Lingwei, a first-semester masters student, wrote a paper that compellingly explained how film studios used myriad research methods to understand audience psychology in order to adapt their marketing strategies for Creation of The Gods â… : Kingdom of Storms, a film whose initial dismissal and eventual enthusiastic embrace among Chinese audiences was in large part attributable to shifts in promotion.
↑↑ Mary, a comparative literature doctoral student, created a fabulous syllabus for an undergraduate course — “History, Memory, and Trauma Through Intermediality” — that parallels her own dissertation research. She makes clever use of Notion to embody, through site architecture, many of the class’s core critical principles.
↑↑ Yui, a second-year liberal arts masters student, sought to use her own experience as a popular lifestyle influencer to examine how Chinese middle-class perceptions of the “good life” are “platformed” and translated through “neoliberal affect” on sites like RED (xiaohongshu).
Finally, Xavier, a first-semester English PhD student, used our class to create a beautifully structured syllabus that allows him — and his hypothetical future students — to explore alternative Cold War Histories through historical and contemporary Southeast Asian cultural forms. He explains: “As we consider Southeast Asia as engendering differing perspectives, experiences, and aspirations about the Cold War, we will consider various cultural expressions—from novel, memoir, and graphic novel to documentary and photography—as crucial sites for the artistic and quotidian negotiation of these differences. In doing so, we will consider the Cold War as simultaneously geopolitical tensions and conflicts, lived experiences, and epistemes that structure our present conceptions about the world. We will also think through the roles of art, archive, and the critic in reckoning with troubled pasts and presents and charting ways forward.”