This semester you will be required to select an outside source, be it a news article, a study, a film, tv show, etc., that you find treats a subject that pertains to our course. You will then do a close reading of this source and write a 750-word, well-formatted blog post that teases out a problem or a theme that we have been discussing. You will be asked to relate the piece you choose back to another piece we’ve already worked through.

The idea is for you to consider what you consume in your daily lives through the critical lens(es) we’ll be deploying throughout this semester, and to make links between the sometimes abstract ideas we deal with in our class and the political and ideological environments we are embedded in. More often than not we treat what happened in the past as distant from our current daily lives; that what happened ‘back then’ is over and done with. However, as we’ll often point out during the semester, we can consider what happens now as being further down a current of history. That remnants of what we thought we had left behind may actually linger in, if not structure, our lives today.

The due dates for your blog post are throughout the semester.

• February 21
• March 14
• April 4
• April 18