By 10:00 am, Monday, April 24th one person from your group should post a description of what your group plans to do for the book project. Remember to check all relevant category boxes. If your group is a little undecided, you may propose two descriptions (but no more than two). Each description should include a WHAT and a WHY.
THE WHAT is a detailed description of what you’re actually planning on doing for the project (e.g. make a book, create a webinar, put on a performance, make a video installation in one of the main bathrooms, present a panel of papers, etc.) You should be as detailed as possible about the WHAT. Don’t just say you’re going to make a physical book or do a performance. Explain the nature of the physical book (i.e. size, material, etc.). Detail the vision of the performance (Improvisation? Scripted, Lyrical, Dance? Musical? Three acts? A one person show? A Musical? And so much more.) Your description should be 2-3 paragraphs.
THE WHY is where you reflect on how your WHAT satisfies the requirements of the assignment (please see the assignment description) and particularly how it resonates with the content you want to communicate. You should explain why you chose the form you chose, and while your explanation might be partly out of personal interest in that form, you need to articulate a rationale that relates that form/medium to the content of your project. How does the form of your particular WHAT speak to the themes/questions/claims you want to highlight? Your WHY should be at least be 2-3 sentences, but if you want to write more, you are welcomed to do so.
For example: So my hypothetical group is working on Beloved. Maybe we randomly decided to make a physical book made out of expired campus flyers. Maybe we came to the idea partly because we were just joking around and partly because half our group is passionate about making Baruch more green and the other half just thought the idea was cool. That’s a fine way to come to the idea (the logistical details of which we will spell out in the WHAT), but then in order to produce a strong WHY, we had to do the WORK of considering how a book made out of expired campus ads might speak to the themes of the course as they play in our novel Beloved? At first it was tough, but then we thought of two things: one that the main character was a fugitive slave, and so there’s something in the print ad that resonates with the danger of escape and hunt. But also the ads we are using are expired, which signifies a passing of the terror of being hunted. In this way the form seems important because by repurposing the expired ads, we both honor the end of that present life of the ads while acknowledging that something of them lives on. This afterlife of the ads resonates with Beloved which is deeply interested in the afterlife of slavery and escape. Beloved‘s interest in this afterlife that is both an end and a continuation resonates with the course themes on monstrosity and liminality. Indeed the monstrous ghost baby in Beloved is monstrous in large part because she is neither in the past or the present and yet she is both in the past and the present. She occupies in her awkwardly infant and adolescent self a liminality that eventually wreaks havoc on those characters around her who cannot both straddle and be outside of past and present.
This rationale would be plenty for the check-in, but one of the purposes of the check-in is to get you thinking about the what and the why because that’s a huge part of what I will want to see in the write-up. So if in articulating the WHY described above, my group has other ideas about how to refine the what and/or why so they speak together, we can say more. So we could decide to limit the type of expired ads we use. If we only use ads that seem to ask students to market or sell themselves or conform themselves to the needs of institutions, well then now the form of our WHAT is in even better conversation with the content because just as the form speaks to the content (the ads for runaway slaves and afterlife of captivity and being hunted) the content of Beloved and the use of the ads in this way gives new life to the content of the ads and makes us think about the content of those expired ads in a new light.