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.

Welcome back – from Reading Week and to blogging! I have some suggestions below to get you started (along with the standard set of prompts I created last semester). As you plan and write your post, remember that point of our research blog to practice our skills in developing and sharing results of our scholarly research, and in particular the methods of qualitative literary analysis. So in your 500-700 words, I look for the post to:

• Develop a research question or questions that address a high-level idea or issue;
• Explore the research question through analysis of a specific research site (a case-study),
• Discuss, as part of that analysis, specific examples, quotations, and other low-level details that you show / explain as illustrating the high-level ideas.
• Provide links to examples AND provide reporting expressions and citations.
• Connect, as always, in some explicit way, to the broad topic of “life narratives” and the issues and ideas we engage in ASTU

What could you write about?

• Return to our discussions of Facebook / social media, Humans of New York, PostSecret, and StoryCorps.
• Work with the reading from Carter, and/or the archives we are discussing on Tuesday (PARI, Mass Observation, and High Muck-a-Muck)
• Look ahead to the Rare Books’ archival collections we’ll start working with on Thursday: the Bamford family papers, Japanese Canadian research collection, Chung collection, Jack Shadbolt fonds, the Kosaburo Shimizu fonds, the Olive Allen Biller collection, the Langmann family papers, Gilean Douglas
• Other archives or archival-related materials: for example, you might be interested in this article, about the digitized archives of 19th coroner’s reports from the American south, which explores how they contain “hundreds” life narratives the coroner collected about his subjects. (I’m wondering: why did the coroner decide this was important work to do, at all?).
• And of course anything else that fits the criteria of being related (or relatable) to ASTU

While you’re here, another post I recommend: Zoe Gray, who took my ASTU class last year, blogged about how archives have used Tumblr to increase access, something that might be of interest to you as you think about your own archival projects. Check out her post for the academic study she cites as well as the many links she includes to archival Tumblers.

Posts are due Mon noon & comments (on THIS post) Tues by 9:30. For full credit on the comments you must comment on 3 separate blog due dates, so if you missed the January post you should comment on each of the next 3.

Archival research can be intimidating when you first start because it seems so different from “regular” research. And it does indeed have some particular challenges. To help you as you begin your research, I’ve put together some pointers for doing archival research.

Before you go into the archives:

• Review all the finding aids or fonds descriptions for the collections you’ll be choosing from. Which ones do you find most interesting? Begin with those papers, but make sure to look at more than one collection, because you can’t know what exciting stuff might be there.
• Think about what questions you have, based on your own interests, the scholarly readings we’ve done, or the goals of the Archives Project. Use these to guide your initial readings, but be open to discovering something new and taking that direction instead or in addition.

When you get to the archives

• If we aren’t meeting as a class, sign out 1 box from the materials assigned. If we are meeting as a group and have the materials already out for us, choose 1 box from the materials assigned.
• Open a Word doc or start notes on the purple pads RBSC provides. Use the finding aid or archival description (typically at the front of the box) to scan through the different materials available: based on what you hope to find or think about, what jumps out at you as most interesting? What else occurs to you as you scan this list that you’d like to check out? Write yourself a list of files to check out.
• Choose one. Immediately, write down the Collection / Fond, the Box number, and the file number you’ve chosen to work with. (You could also take a photo, but it’s a good practice to keep the notes and file info together in one document.)
• Start reading, carefully flipping through the pages (remembering to keep materials in the order you’ve found them).
• Draw on your skills in qualitative literary analysis: read these as texts. What makes them meaningful, and how, and to whom? Think about audience (original and archival), rhetorical structures, genres, functions, even literary devices. What patterns emerge, in the one collection and also across collections (e.g., how artists represent their work to their agents in correspondence)? What seems anomalous, why, and how? What intrigues you and you need more information about?
• Feel free to take photos of documents so that you can consult them later; just be sure your flash is off and the archive tag is included in the image.
• Don’t hesitate to call on the archival staff for help about archival questions. For historical or contextual information about the people, times, events etc related to your chosen archival material, use Google!
• General advice: Pace yourself, giving yourself time to look through multiple folders or collections if it’s your first time working with the materials. Explore. Be open to discovery. The goal is to find 5-6 documents that you’d like to talk about because they illustrate an idea, issue, or research problem you think needs addressing.

Yes, you can be on social media as homework!

For Tues, Jan 31 complete Authoethnographic Social Media Research Profile (handout by email / on Connect) and watch Eli Pariser’s TED Talk, “Beware Online ‘Filter Bubbles’” & read this blog “Facebook has decided it is time I had a baby“.

For Thurs, Feb 2, read the following sites: Humans of New York, PostSecret, and StoryCorps. FYI: PostSecret in particular will have some “adult content.”

Come ready to talk about the questions below AND 2+ specific examples of posts from each site.

For each site, read and take notes on:

• their site history or “About” page
• What clues do you get about the site’s imagined audiences and purposes?
• a few of the stories / postcards: be sure to get a variety of topics, dates, subjects. Do you notice any patterns about the featured stories?
• which ones get the most comments (and what kinds of comments), reposts, likes, etc., and any patterns that emerge
• what clues do you get about the site’s values, world-views, ideologies, or beliefs?

Think about:

• Who gets to speak, and what they talk about on these sites?
• How are stories communicated? (Think about genres, about what motivates storytelling, editing, etc.)
• What does the existence, and indeed, the success of these pages suggest to you about contemporary life narratives?

You could also check out each one’s social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, etc): does the social media platform change any aspects of what gets shared and how?

A new year, a new semester, a new set of blog posts & comments! After reading several posts by your classmates, please add your comment to this post.

I’ve been thinking about Chute and some more about “Pen Pineapple Apple Pen“: what a great way to think about “productive disjuncture.” Yes? No? 🙂

See you next week!

I’ve gathered some links for you, both recommended and required, to check out that relate to Missing Sarah:

• Required: For Tues, Nov 22, please watch this CBC interview with Maggie and Jeanie de Vries (~9 minutes long).
• Recommended: you may want to read this interview, “You May Think That, But,” with Maggie de Vries in the journal Canadian Literature, in which she discusses how she wrote Missing Sarah. *Note: link goes to database page: you will need to be logged in through UBC Library / your CWL to access it. If the link doesn’t work, put the title into Summon.
• Recommended: You might be interested in checking out a couple of films related to Missing Sarah: one is Through a Blue Lens (full-length via YT), a “scared-straight” anti-drug documentary made by the Vancouver Police on the Downtown Eastside, featuring the life narratives of several addicts. (If you watched it in high school, I’d recommend watching it again in this new context.) There is also a new feature-length film, On the Farm, that tells the story of the women killed by Pickton, using a fictionalized composite character. (Watch the whole thing here, through the CBC.) I haven’t seen this film yet and therefore can’t gauge how graphic or upsetting it might be – practice self-care if you decide to check it out.

Blog Post 5 (due at noon, Nov 21. Remember late posts are not accepted):

For our final post this term, you have 2 options:

1. Write a standard research post. This can be a good place to try out some of the ideas of your lit review, for example, or to explore new materials.

2. Create an auto/biographical representation – a gif, self-portrait, playlist, spoken word performance, whatever – that you share in the blog along with a description of about 300 words that reflects on the process of creating it. Explain the choices you made, including choice of genre and medium, content, etc., and how it works to represent you, or some aspect of you, or to reflect on or summarize an experience (“my first term at UBC,” perhaps?). Remember the posts are public to anyone with a CWL.

Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird.

Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3518151

For your 4th blog, continue to choose your own research topic that focuses on some aspects of life narratives or the representations of lives, as outlined with lots of topic suggestions in blog 3 (review here). You can write about World is Moving, about Jiwani & Young, the issues both raise about how media represent lives / subjects, or any of the primary and secondary readings to date (think, though, about what you’re adding to our discussions that’s new). You can also take up the popular readings I’ve asked you to complete alongside Jiwani & Young for Nov 8: “When the Media Treats White Suspects Better than Black Victims,” Chris Hayes’ spoof journalism, as discussed in this story, and “I am Not Your Wife, Sister, or Daughter” (and you might check out the myriad discussions of the wife/daughter/sister trope that surfaced after the Trump Tape media storm).

Leave your comments on each others’ posts here by Tues 9:30 am.

For Tuesday’s class, please look at 2 blog posts, “We’re Not Here for Your Inspiration“ and “But You Don’t Look Disabled,” an interview with filmmaker Jason DaSilva, and the Sundance trailer, with with extra footage (here), for his documentary film When I Walk. The documentary chronicles DaSilva’s experiences with MS, and explores what it means for him to navigate the world as a person with a disability (see the). The feature-length film is only the latest (and longest) of DaSilva’s self-representations; he’s been a video blogger for years (see one here, but also note his many posts for organizations such as the MS Society, including this one).

Please read the post below (“Free-Range Blogging”) for directions about writing your next post (due Mon Oct 17).

Also, looking ahead to our work with The World is Moving Around Me, please pay attention to media responses (and some artistic ones, too) to the devastation that Hurricane Matthew has wrought on Haiti.

This week you will choose your own topic for the blog, working with the expectations of the assignment. The blog post must in some way address the ideas, materials, and discussions of our course, and in particular the study of life narratives. For example, it could:

• Take up an aspect of one of our readings that you don’t understand, or that you find problematic, or that you find particularly useful, and explore why;
• Raise one or two insightful new questions about what we’re reading and then explore your own questions;
• Take up another student’s post or comment in class as your own launching point (build on, rethink, develop the original’s ideas)
• Bring in new material (website, video, news story, image, etc., all properly attributed) relevant to our current discussions, and connect it to the scholars and writers we’re studying.
• Connect what we’re doing in ASTU 100A to a concept, issue, or discussion in another of your CAP classes.

What might that look like? Here are some starting points, if you are stuck:

• Take one of the recommended readings from Smith and Watson (see course schedule) and work with that concept in relation to Cockeyed, or another life narrative we’ve studied or that you’ve read.
• Look ahead to the blogs & videos I’ve asked you to look at for Tuesday’s class and write about them (I’ll post these separately).
• Apply Couser (or Whitlock, or another scholar we’ve read) to other life narratives, beyond our reading list. Take up an issue or the scholar discusses and use it to think about a new research site. Or connect one of our scholars to other scholarly and popular conversations.
• Consider representations of disability (or, taking a page from Whitlock, of subjects from the Middle East).
• Put 2 or more of the life narratives we’ve read so far into conversation: what do we learn about by looking at these texts together?
• Find new instances of life narratives working in the world: for example, how are US political campaigns using their candidate’s life narrative as a form of political rhetoric? Note that Hillary Clinton is featured on Humans of New York (and I don’t think Trump is, interestingly).

Posts are due Monday and comments Tuesday @ 9:30.