Participation has four components: Attendance (Lecture attendance is marked), Reading, Discussion at Tutorials and showing evidence of having prepared for  tutorials by handing in a Discussion Preparation Guide at the end of every tutorial.

Attendance:

Every student is required to attend a weekly lecture and tutorial as prerequisite for a Pass in this course. Should you miss a lecture or tutorial for medical and/or other unavoidable reasons, please supply explanations. Failing to attend less than two thirds of the lectures and tutorials without explanation will be considered a serious enough matter to result in failing the course. Lecture attendance sheets will be collected, and your discussion preparation guides are evidence of attendance and preparation for tutorials.

Reading:

Lectures: Students are advised to read at least one reading for each lecture. This course is a blend of theory and ethnography, so make sure you get a reasonable exposure to both to do well in this course.

Tutorials: The tutorial readings are designed to consolidate and extend the lecture material, so prepare for the weekly tutorial. Each week’s reading refers back to the lecture you heard the previous week, giving you a chance to consolidate what you have already read and heard. You should come to the tutorials prepared to discuss these readings as well as lectures. Bodily experience is a key dimension to this course – so use the tutorials as a creative space not only to discuss written material, but to integrate it with your experience and share it with others.

1. 15% for short written summaries of 3 key theorists: Heidegger, Merleau- Ponty and Bourdieu. The accounts, around 3 pages, should convey to the convenor your understanding of the key points made in lectures/readings on each of these theorists. More specific questions to guide your summary will be distributed in class.

The idea with the first essay is to use one or both of the theorists studied thus far in order to focus on an area of bodily experience as a way into the wider themes of the course.

The student should take one of the areas for which reading is provided in the course outline, such as  illness, story telling, poetry and music, dance, birth/death, mourning, bodily memory, spirit possession, virtual reality. But there is room here for taking an area of bodily experience you have particular interest in - one student was training to be a chef and wrote it on cooking as bodily practice. Just discuss with me in advance.

How can the ideas of embodiment learned so far in this course be used to illuminate your chosen area of bodily experience?

An additional reading list will be handed out by Week 3 to help you on your way (but browse Reserve Library listings for this course). If students wish to experiment with form, then this is the piece of assessment to attempt this with. 

This paper is due by the end of the mid-semester break, in our first class back. 

 These essays will be due by the last week of lectures. 

For your second essay, work mainly on the theme of social power. For this, you may use a combination of Foucault, Bourdieu and Said, with more or less emphasis on any of them. Of the three, Said is the more minor theorist so make sure you use either Foucault or Bourdieu.

For Bourdieu the key questions concern the way in which the habitus, in its relation to particular practical situations, equips people with key orientations, dispositions, skills and expectations which either allows them to fare better or worse in terms of interacting with dominant institutions and discourses. His life long preoccupation was with class, and with international systems of domination. For Foucault the key questions concern the operations of power at the micro-level, through ‘discursive practices’.

For Said, also influenced in part by Foucault, the key question was the way in which representations and discourses perpetuated an unequal relation at all levels between a “west” that has been constructed on the basis of colonial and neo-colonial relations with the rest of the world.

Take an empirical area for your focus. It might be migration and the political economy/discourses/institutional power clustered around the relations between migrants and “native” citizens. Or you might take the situation of Aboriginal people in Australia or indigenous communities elsewhere. It might be a specific area of gender and power.

You may, if deeply interested in the area that you took as your key area of ‘bodily experience’ in the first essay (eg. illness,), continue to focus on that area but now re-examine it primarily in the light of the above theorists, and write on the way that that area of bodily experience is also shaped by power relations of various kinds (eg. in relation to medicine as institution, as discourse, as clinical relation to ‘patients’).