| 01 | -T-R--- | 4:00P-5:20P | Lewis Center / 1ST | Loewenstein, Knox, Cunningham | No final | 0 | 10 | 0 |
Desc: | The university's first Studiolab, Freedom | Information | Acts, is a full-year interdisciplinary course bridging cultural studies, sociological inquiry, and digital humanities. Students will work collaboratively, applying digital tools and methods to archival materials on social movements from the Civil Rights Movement to Ferguson, with the aim to enhance and expand public access to digital archives. We will consider the relation between studying and surveilling, information and evidence, historical understanding and resolute action - the distinctions between the elements of each pair as well as their entanglements.
During the fall semester, we will direct our work towards preparing a research methods course for students in the Prison Education Project degree program at Missouri Eastern Correctional Center. Because PEP students experience constrained access to educational resources, it will be Studiolab's goal to research, design, and implement tools and methods that increase access to library materials and enable research as part of their fall semester work. The course at MECC will run in the Spring semester, with Studiolab involvement.
At the same time, students will follow a traditional graduate seminar format with workshop activities and on-site investigations. In the fall, they will study existing archives at WUSTL: those of Civil Rights Movement documentarians Henry Hampton and Jack Willis. Under the guidance of library staff, students will learn how text, video, and sound recording are digitized, tagged, and indexed, thereby gaining first-hand knowledge of decision-making in the archival process. In mid-semester, we will travel to Mississippi to investigate how contemporary institutions present urgent historical materials. In the spring, students will turn to more local social movement histories to examine the stakes of broadening information access when the subjects in question are politically vulnerable populations. They will study how institutions, technology, and ethics inform the development of these histories.
The Studiolab will convene at the Lewis Collaborative, a living-learning-commercial space at the west end of the Delmar Loop. All A&S graduate students and advanced undergraduates are invited to participate. Undergraduate enrollment by permission of the instructors. As a year-long course, students are expected to enroll in both the fall and spring sections. This course may fulfill the global or minority literatures requirement for students who declare an English major in the fall 2021 semester and beyond. 3 units per term. |
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