Professor Gillian Harkins Office Hours M/W 11am -12pm
Email: gharkins@uw.edu Separate meetings by appointment
English 506A Autumn 2023 In Person: 504-A Padelford Hall
Room SAV 162 Virtual: Office Hour Link
Mon / Wed 3:30 – 5:20 PM
Introduction to Graduate Studies in English:
Artefacts / Arguments / Audiences
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- What audience or public do you want to address, engage, or call into being?
- What claims do you want to make or stories do you want to tell?
- How will you transform a limited set of artifacts into evidence of those claims or stories in a way that will be persuasive for that audience or public?
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-- Miriam Bartha and Bruce Burgett, “Why Public Scholarship Matters for Graduate Education,” Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture 15.1 (2014)
This is the University of Washington Course Catalog description of English 506: Engages disciplinary genealogies. Offers a grounding in key theories of language, power, circulation, and representation at the root of contemporary scholarship in literary, cultural, writing, language, and rhetorical studies. Addresses some important ways objects of study, methodologies, practices, and terms of value have been constituted, challenged, and re-envisioned.
Our Fall 2023 version of this course will take the epigraph above (from University of Washington’s Miriam Bartha and Bruce Burgett) as inspiration. The course is designed as an exploration, not a way to bank or accumulate knowledge as certainty. Our goal is to acclimate everyone who arrives in the classroom to graduate study in English and its interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral conversations. To meet this goal, each week of the course is organized around specific questions. What do we mean by Artefact / Audience / Argument? A university? An English Department? Literature? Culture? Language? Method? Theory? Course materials will include a range of theoretical and critical writing about the following key topics: language, literature, culture, aesthetics, political economy, racial formation, gender, sexuality, colonialism, nation and empire. Feel free to contact me if you have questions.
Required Texts
All readings will be provided on the Canvas website for the course. If you have any trouble accessing these readings, please contact me.
Course Objectives
- Explore being a graduate student
- Explore some key concepts or keywords
- Discuss frameworks such as University and English
- Discuss approaches such as method and theory
- Explore frameworks and approaches
Course Requirements
- Discussion: This class meets twice a week to explore shared readings. Please come to seminar with passages circled, questions ready, and confusion welcomed. We will start each class by reading with the assigned piece, giving it a generous welcome and attending to what might have been at stake in thinking and writing this way. We will then move on to our concerns, doubts, or critiques of the piece, with an emphasis on what might be modified or made useful about engaging more critically. We will decide how to best use Hypothesis and/or an on-line discussion board together.
- Portfolio: Weekly shorter writing and response assignments will be collected in a portfolio and used for a final seminar reflection at the end of the quarter. This will be the major writing for the class and will be low-stakes (credit/no credit).
- Interviews: You have the *option* to conduct one or two informal interviews with faculty members and/or graduate students between weeks 8 and 10 of the course. Your write up for these interviews would be entered for that week's Portfolio. If you choose not to do these interviews, you will write a regular Portfolio entry for these weeks.
- Deep Dive: One deeper dive into an area of our course readings will be due at the end of the quarter. The goal is to return to your earlier learning and extend it, to explore new ideas that have arisen now that you have completed the quarter, and to read at least one additional piece related to the area. We will create the assessment criteria together.
Course Policies
- Academic Conduct: We all share responsibility for creating a positive shared learning community. Everyone is invited to raise questions and offer additional perspectives about any materials discussed in class. Everyone is also expected to contribute their ideas in a manner that is thoughtful and respectful of the ideas expressed by others. Here are some useful guidelines for class discussions.
- Academic Integrity: The University takes academic integrity very seriously. Behaving with integrity is part of our responsibility to our shared learning community. Please review this University of Washington website for a definition and explanation of academic misconduct. If you are confused or have any questions about a specific instance, please feel free to see me in advance of the due date.
- Academic Accommodations: It is the policy and practice of the University of Washington to create inclusive and accessible learning environments consistent with federal and state law. If you have already established accommodations with Disability Resources for Students (DRS) , please activate your accommodations via myDRS so we can discuss how they will be implemented in this course. If you have not yet established services through DRS, but have a temporary health condition or permanent disability that requires accommodations (conditions include but not limited to; mental health, attention-related, learning, vision, hearing, physical or health impacts), contact DRS directly to set up an Access Plan. DRS facilitates the interactive process that establishes reasonable accommodations.
- Religious Accommodations: Washington state law requires that UW develop a policy for accommodation of student absences or significant hardship due to reasons of faith or conscience, or for organized religious activities. The UW’s po icy, including more information about how to request an accommodation, is available at Religious Accommodations Policy. Accommodations must be requested within the first two weeks of this course using the Religious Accommodations Request form.
Additional Resources
Additional support for technology access, writing and research support, financial and health needs, food, parenting, and legal resources and have been gathered at this link: https://english.washington.edu/resources-times-need.
Course Schedule
Click Here (Course Schedule Home Page) to go to the full schedule of course assignments.