Wednesday 14 November, 12:00
Stage 3 lecture
Ellie received her BA from Princeton and PhD from Cambridge and has published on literature, history, art history, politics and culture; her most recent book is The Afterlife of John Brown (Palgrave/Macmillan). She has been a media commentator on contemporary politics and culture with Bob Fisk, Germaine Greer, and the editors of the New Yorker. She was a US National Endowment of the Humanities Fellow and a Government of Ireland fellow and is currently Principal Lecturer at the London College of Fashion and head of the Electives programme.
Ellie will speak about approaches to researching and writing a dissertation or book; varieties of research; kinds of sources and archives; challenges encountered in research and ways of resolving them.
skip to main |
skip to sidebar
This discussion page has been set up to let BACCC students share opinions and comments about guest lectures.
What we'd like is that you write up your notes from the lectures and post them here. You can also respond to posts.
The blog represents a project I'm doing as part of my teacher-training (PGCert in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education). My aim is to try to get students to engage with the guest lectures in a more critical way, learning how to ask better questions of the speaker and draw the material from the lectures into the work you do in essays and other projects.
When I was doing my MA in art history, first year students were required to attend every guest lecture and write up a 1-page critical analysis, which was marked by our tutor. We were also encouraged to pose informed questions of the speaker. The exercise was effective because it made us into active listeners, gave us practice taking good notes, and, by writing up our notes, created a context where we reflected on the lecture, its content and the speaker's particular approach, developing an 'argument' about it, much like you would about a reading.
By making this activity take place online (instead of something students share only with their tutor) my hope is that the exercise will accomplish, for those who take part, the things mentioned above, but also generate a dialogue between students.
The discussion also has the potential to be expansive--you might like to post comments referring to related material or relevant links, in effect sharing research.
I hope this works. Please let me know!
The Lecture series
- Kathleen Madden--Wed. 10 Oct.
- Paula Smithard--Mon. 15 Oct.
- Judith Batalion--Wed. 17 Oct.
- Alistair O'Neill--Thurs. 18 Oct.
- Sir John Tusa--Thurs. 25 Oct.
- Sonia Ashmore--Mon. 5 Nov.
- Speaker TBA--Tues. 6 Nov.
- Judith Batalion--Wed. 7 Nov.
- Eldrid Herrington--Wed. 14 Nov.
- Linda Sandino--Wed. 14 Nov.
- Mary Schoeser--Thurs. 15 Nov.
- Gavin Wade--Tues. 20 Nov.
Welcome to the BACCC Forum
This discussion page has been set up to let BACCC students share opinions and comments about guest lectures.
What we'd like is that you write up your notes from the lectures and post them here. You can also respond to posts.
The blog represents a project I'm doing as part of my teacher-training (PGCert in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education). My aim is to try to get students to engage with the guest lectures in a more critical way, learning how to ask better questions of the speaker and draw the material from the lectures into the work you do in essays and other projects.
When I was doing my MA in art history, first year students were required to attend every guest lecture and write up a 1-page critical analysis, which was marked by our tutor. We were also encouraged to pose informed questions of the speaker. The exercise was effective because it made us into active listeners, gave us practice taking good notes, and, by writing up our notes, created a context where we reflected on the lecture, its content and the speaker's particular approach, developing an 'argument' about it, much like you would about a reading.
By making this activity take place online (instead of something students share only with their tutor) my hope is that the exercise will accomplish, for those who take part, the things mentioned above, but also generate a dialogue between students.
The discussion also has the potential to be expansive--you might like to post comments referring to related material or relevant links, in effect sharing research.
I hope this works. Please let me know!
1 comment:
Dr Eldrid Herrington shared with us her challenging journey to unmask some relevant facts, not only about Black poetry and Black publications during the American Civil War, but also haunting questions of America’s self-identity and national dementia. The latter in fact is a universal ‘ quality’ so to speak , just as ,ironically the history is no longer a binding metanarrative (at least according to a post-modern discourse). I couldn’t resist but to summon what Jean Baudrillard once wrote, that the forgetting extermination is part of extermination, because it is also extermination of memory, of history, of the social etc. One would like to have us believe that TV or Hollywood will lift the weight of Slavery , of Auschwitz , of Hiroshima, of La Commune, you name it, by making a collective awareness shine. However ,television is just another means of deterrence , under auspices of camouflage , by feeding those tragic experiences into a language , that neutralizes them. I’m referring to popular Cinema and TV medium in particular , because it’s the new mass media that in 20th century supplanted older forms of culture and due to their overwhelming accessibility, it is them who induce a public consciousness, or perhaps false consciousness, to put it in Adorno’s words . So there certainly might be a significant advance in the portrayal of the Blacks in Gone With a Wind, while Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh keep copulating ,and administer a romantic vision of the South, just as Denzel Washington might give a performance of a real depth in The Glory , but let’s face it : no real distance, no human approach , just a retro megalomania with a holocaust of means. Now one may protest at this point and observe that it’s nothing new to criticize Hollywood, we all know it’s a commercialized crap, there are plenty of ‘good’ documentaries on ‘those’ subjects, some of us maybe did history at A-Levels ,read academic journals , etc . Nonetheless I would argue that due to TV commercialisation most of the so-called valuable stuff is to be seen rather in Art Ghettos and private screenings, just as the most of the academic material remains in the academic circles. People who make pseudodocumentary education /entertainment often seem to feel so proud of themselves, that they have done SOME research. Perhaps because most TV is entirely fantasy. The perfect example of media reluctance to speak about the inconvenient truths , to use Al Gore’s jargon, is marginalisation of British filmmaker Peter Watkins, whose work happens to be a main subject of my dissertation. To British public he is mostly known for his BBC docudrama ‘Culloden’ where he demythologized one of the most brutal and mishandled battles in this country. In late sixties Watkins was asked to come to make a trilogy of historical films for the Learning Corporation of America. Oddly enough, these films on the American Revolution, the Civil War , and the Indian wars , were to be co-produced by a West German television station. From June to September of 1969 , Watkins lived in Maryland and researched his script for a film on the Civil War. Soon he realized that the Learning Corporation would not be especially enthusiastic about a film that demythologized the event by highlighting the carnage of the struggle, the opposition to the war in the North, and grim historical ironies. Although Watkins knew the film would never be produced, he decided to finish the lengthy script which he called State of the Union. It remained one of his most scrupulously researched scripts, including an account of Lincoln’s emancipation plans. Short after this incident he hit upon the idea of making Punishment Park, a vivid documentary dramatisation of the growing dissonance of political attitudes in the United States. Although highly controversial, it’s worth watching. Has anyone seen it? I’d love to hear some thoughts as it usually triggers extreme opinions (very helpful for my dissertation! :)
Post a Comment