Suddenly, it’s April and the year is ending. It doesn’t seem like very long ago that we met for the first time in September, in the SWNG building, to start thinking about academic writing and research and personal narratives and how they connect out to larger issues that connect to “global citizenship” and beyond. I have learned so much from you as we have worked together, and I am grateful for our learning together.

For your final blog of the year, your assignment is to write a post that articulates an idea or issue that ASTU has raised and about which your thinking has changed over the year. Choose a text as a case-study to illustrate that idea (this is the usual practice of our blogs: analyze a text that illustrates high-level abstractions). This can be a text from our reading list, including the archival materials you just studied, OR an ASTU-related text of your choosing. Reflect on the significance of the idea or issue and what your changes in thinking about it suggest.

As you usually do, follow best practices of academic writing and blogs, e.g., using links & citations, reporting expressions, forecasts, abstractions, and so on. But you are welcome, also, to write from a personal position, as you reflect on your own experiences and learning.

Posts are due Saturday, April 8 at noon, and comments by Monday, April 10 at noon. Feel free to post early!

ETA: I thought you might like to check out each others’ excellent archival projects again. So here are the links to the 5 projects:

Etsuji Mori wiki

Jack Shadbolt Prezi.

Jack Shadbolt bird sketches Tumblr

Gilean Douglas fan letter “Heritage Minute” (YT)

BC Security Commission website.

Also, while I have your eyeballs here, can i encourage you to fill out the FYP exit survey? This is the other half, essentially, of the survey you answered in September, so we are hoping to hear again from as many of the original respondents as we can. It takes less than 10 mins and you have chance to win a $25 gift certificate to the Bookstore.

This week, as always, you can choose your own text and topic to studying relation to the issues, concepts, and frameworks we’ve taken up in ASTU. Remember that I’m looking for posts to develop analytical discussions of these texts, using specific examples to illustrate the abstractions that you’re engaging, and linking to + citing all your sources. You could blog about the materials you’re working on in the archives, or any of the archival readings or sites we’ve been studying as a class; this article, about a recent life narrative by an IRS survivor, Arthur Bear Chief, picks up on our discussions not just of the TRC and archives, but of the work of auto/biography in bearing witness and the need to speak so that his experiences, and those of others, will be remembered. This article might be of interest, too: it discusses a writer’s encounters with a woman’s WWII diary kept in the Mass Observation archives and how the ordinary beauty of this diary and its observations on daily life inspired her to write a novel based on it. (You yourselves don’t have time to write novels based on the archives for your projects! But maybe later.)

You can write about Diamond Grill or you might also take up topics about or inspired by Diamond Grill: e.g., biotexts or food memoirs or High Muck-a-Muck or the contemporary Canadian long poem or poems by on prison walls by Chinese immigrants, etc. You could extend our discussion of The Race Card Project.

Another direction inspired by our discussions of the complicated genealogy of the book would be to think more about Diamond Grill as a family memoir. Wah (Jr) is not, of course, writing in a vacuum but, as we’ve discussed, inscribing a relational story. As he acknowledges, he’s writing about his family and community. In an essay on The Conversation (a website in which scholars write for a general public, just like you will in your archives projects), sociologist Ashley Barnwell considers the ethics of the family memoir, looking at several instances of life narratives in which family members who were represented by these texts rejected, resented, or publicly protested the versions of the family that the author produced. Not only is Barnwell’s analysis relevant to our discussions, it’s also a cross-disciplinary encounter in action: how a sociologist reads life narratives (vs our readings as literary and cultural studies scholars). You could introduce and respond to her ideas by thinking about these issues in relation to Wah’s text or other life narratives.

ETA: I came across this photography project, in which the artist represents depression through auto/photography: “what if I tried on lives like I try on dresses,” she asks. This study connects in a number of conceptual ways to our course but also to our discussions of the visual, such as in HONY.

Posts are due Monday March 20, at noon. Comments are due Tuesday, March 21 @ 9:30 am. Please add comments to this post.