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 cinema and media studies, dance, education, English, finance, graphic design, historic preservation, landscape architecture, liberal arts, music composition, Spanish and Portuguese, television production, 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, methods for sharing and performing, 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 commonplace books mapping and celebrating our associative research methods; some of us drafted IRB proposals; some of us developed proposals for long-term global policy research; some of us made zines highlighting historical documents; some of us created experimental program notes for our own performances; some of us prototyped method toolkits for our dissertations; some of us wrote papers.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 🙂
Asher, whose dissertation research examines how alternative film exhibition venues and programs shape how people engage with film and regard it as an ontological object, began developing a “dossier” of methods, including a database of select exhibition venues, a protocol for exhibition ethnography, and discourse analysis techniques for analyzing the myriad paratexts surrounding the film exhibition.
Janneane created a multimedia syllabus, “Ties that Bind: Being with Nature,” — featuring music, readings, listening and screening exercises, and a variety of artworks in a range of formats — posing “ecocritical and ecohumanist questions, [demonstrating] multi-species entanglements, and [sharing] some of [her] own methods in an ongoing exploration of how we relate with and to nature.”
JJ sought to learn more about “the effectiveness of government interventions in the media and entertainment industries by examining South Korea and the United Kingdom as comparative case studies from the 1990s to the present,” and assessing their “adaptability to the Philippine context.” His study integrates “return on investment analysis, content evaluation and stakeholder interviews together in a longitudinal comparative case study.”
Andrew, a composer, sought to find creative ways to acknowledge the historical and theoretical research behind his work, so he experimented with various modalities of “program notes” as means of “annotating” and “citing” one of his upcoming intermedia performances.
Sean also created a syllabus, “Nourishing the Nation” — featuring scholarly texts and kitchen tours, cookbooks and culinary experiences — that explores “the profound connections between food, identity, memory, and power, investigating how the spaces of the kitchen and table become stages for cultural expression, political resistance, and social transformation.”
Weike made a syllabus, too! Taking the Belgian filmmaker as its guide, “Walking and Sleeping with Bas Devos” features art and literature that examine the “history, cultural significance, and poetics” of these seemingly quotidian acts — and, through a series of creative exercises, encourages participants to imagine walking and sleeping as social rituals, creative performances, and critical practices.
Lia created a zine to reanimate and draw new readers to Booker T. Washington’s 1915 The Negro Rural School and its Relation to the Community. As Lia explains, “Washington believed the union of self-determination and education could provide a real paradigm shift for Black Americans in the aftermath of Reconstruction and continued Jim Crow oppression and violence.” She imagines this as the first in a series of zines featuring marginalized public domain texts that have much to teach contemporary historic preservationists.
Jude sought to better understand the unique qualities of “pandemic nostalgia” and its modes of “viral” circulation by studying the public discourse around two COVID-era media texts: Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Tiger King, which, he argues, “serve as indices of broader affective, epistemological, and cultural formations attuned to the temporal and sociocultural currents of Pandemic time.”
Kelvin created a syllabus for a course that “combines the content of a landscape architecture professional practice course with the imaginative thrust of a speculative research seminar, refracted through lenses and methods associated with critical performance ethnography and performance studies.” As Kelvin puts it, “These may sound like strange bedfellows, but together, they offer us a series of invitations to be curious and wonder together about what it means to be professional, to practice, to historicize and contextualize both, and to imagine them otherwise.”
Finally, Cecilia created a textual / annotative triptych — “Annotating into the Abyss: Adventures in Infinity” — chronicling and analyzing some of her own wall text work at the Rosenbach Museum: the project illustrates her attempt to “backwards-design a bespoke method for [her] writing” that captures and celebrates the associative, digressive thinking process, “using a mixture of organizing tools both old and familiar (commonplace books, the alphabet, tripartite structure) and new (Miro).”