Week 8: Situational Subjects
8.0 Situational Subjects
Objective(s): to examine how students’ life experiences participate in the process of representing people, places, things, and systems; to identify and analyze characters in relationship to each other, data, and the writer/project manager.
Hours: 22-24
Orientation
During Week 8, the CDF curriculum attends to the way writers’/project managers’ lived experiences influence how they situate people, places, things, systems, structures into representations. Stories can be fictional or nonfictional. Stories represent lived experience. Representation is a reflexive activity. More commonly, representation directly refers to a portrayal of subjects, objects, things, and systems (i.e., the plot, characters, meaning, etc.) organized in an intentional way (i.e., style, structure, etc.). Less commonly, representations emerge from the lived experiences of storytellers and so indirectly signify the storytellers’ lived experiences that underlie but are negated by the story. Here, lived experiences refer to the material encounters of writers and less a psychic interiority. Both indirect and direct representations are mobilized through the act of reading, though the former is undercritiqued.
Activities
Premise
Understanding the material impact and psychological significance surrounding the stakes and stakeholder will help students engage antiracism storytelling.
Purpose
The purpose of this exercise is for students to identify the stakeholders and stakes they wish to emphasize through their project’s narrative.
Preparation
From your research, identify the stakeholders affected by your research. Describe each stakeholders’ relationships to a) your research topic; b) other stakeholders; and c) any cultural privileges affirmed by your discipline/field (e.g., native English-speakers; cis-gendered men of European descent; etc.). Next, identify preliminary stakes affecting each stakeholder. Then, describe how you will attempt to represent each stakeholder through your project.
Protocol
We highlight three ways students might engage this exercise.
- Q/A (individual). The first is q-and-a, where students simply write their responses to each question.
- Fill-in-the-Table (individual). The second is fill-in-the-blanks, in which students generate a six-column spreadsheet and add prose to each field (see example).
- Call-and-Response (partners). The third approach is a paired activity, call-and-response, where Partner One identifies their stakeholders and answers the five questions verbally while Partner Two records Partner One’s answers. Once complete, Partner One reviews and revises Partner Two’s record to better reflect their interests. Then they switch and Partner One records Partner Two’s answers.
| Stakeholders | Relationship to Topic | Relationship to Stakeholders | Disciplinary Privileges | Stakes | Project’s Representation |
| Stakeholder 1 | |||||
| Stakeholder 2 | |||||
| ⋮ | |||||
Premise
Stories feature central and peripheral characters that act, react, and are acted upon. In other words, stories center on conflict.
Purpose
The purpose of this exercise is to clarify your project’s central conflict and the positions and privileges of each character (i.e., stakeholder) in relationship to that conflict.
Preparation
Students review the results from their Stakeholders exercise to identify which ones will become characters represented by their projects.
Protocol
Students begin to outline their story by identifying three narrative aspects: conflict, sequence, and characterization.
- Conflict
- Respond to one question. What story do you want your data to tell? How do you want to showcase your research? What is your story about?
- Sequence
- What does your audience need to know in order to understand the conflict? Identify the specific steps. How will you attempt to address/resolve the conflict? Identify the steps.
- Characterization
- Who will your story feature? What are the situational factors surrounding the subjects in your story? -around the position of its narrator? -around you and the course project?
- Diagram
- Once the brainstorming activities are completed, then diagram or map the power dynamics among the characters. Complete as groups or individually (depending on project design), then share.