LEARNING DIARY 70%
3000 words
The Learning Diary may be a new mode of assessment for you. So what does it involve?
• The key aim, as the name suggests, is for you to demonstrate your learning, and the ongoing processes of learning over the course. What different ways of thinking about and describing the everyday have been opened up to you over the module? What theorists have you been introduced to? How can you apply their ideas to particular aspects of the everyday? What is the everyday?
• In particular you are also being asked to reflect on your own everyday, and on that of others, thinking about the relation between them. Does everyday life in the west depend on very different everyday lives in Africa or East Asia, for example? Or on technology which mediates between geographically distant everydays?So whilst you will be drawing on academic ideas and reading from the course, this Learning Diary may be more personal in tone and writing style than one you may already have completed for another course, or is customary in essay writing.
• The final piece of work should not engage with topics and reading from every session, though we would expect you to reflect on material across several sessions, and on material encountered at different points in the term. You can draw on your presentation topic but should not devote more than 800 words of the Learning Diary to it.
• Your Learning Diary does require an introduction (maybe what your initial thoughts were about doing the course, or your responses to the first article/ the vacation exercise/introductory lecture), and some kind of conclusion (maybe what you consider most important in terms of what you have learnt). But it can be more fragmentary than the conventional essay. It might be composed of 3 or 4 separate pieces of writing of different lengths, supported by research fragments, notes in progress, plus visual material, or there might be a visual thread running through the Diary which tells a slightly different ‘story’ than is being told through your words. ie. Your piece of work is likely to retain something of the scrapbook. You have the freedom to get away from one of the conventions of essay writing – the building up of a coherent argument across sections. The point of this Learning diary is to build up a sense of the multi-facetedness and complexity of ‘culture and the everyday’.
• However you should adopt the same academic conventions as you use in an essay for quotes and citing sources. Likewise ensure you list your bibliography at the end.
• Your work should try to demonstrate evidence not only of your engagement with core readings but with further articles and chapters whether listed in the course guide, recommended by your tutor, or found by you. As a rule of thumb we would hope for no less than 6 academic references beyond core readings in your reader, at least half of which should relate to topics other than your presentation.
• As is perhaps already evident from the above, we would like your own ‘writer’s voice’ to shine through this piece of work. In writing this Diary you are likely to shift between a third person and first person address. You might like to demarcate these by a different typeface.
How will the Learning Diary be assessed? (See also the ‘General Assessment Criteria’ on SyD)
• The bullet points above suggest the specific criteria markers will be looking for. But individual Learning Diaries can take a more varied form than the fairly rigid essay. Whilst allowing you to be more creative in writing and presentation it may mean that you are not able to stick to all the criteria indicated. That’s fine so long as it is completed in the spirit of a Learning Diary.
Can I use images from Google?
– Yes you can, but you may need to reference them.
Do I need to reference images?
– Yes if you are analysing them (if you are referring to them in order to make a point). No if they are being used only as illustration. If you are referencing an image label the figures (Figure 1. Figure 2) then give the source of the image in the bibliography (website, magazine etc.). Create a separate section in your bibliography for this.
Introducing the topics
Week 6 Changing habits
The culture of everyday life is deeply marked by routine, habit and repetition. Yet it also clearly changes over time. This week we will consider the tension between repetition and change through the question of how we have or should change our relationship to the environment. Reducing carbon emissions, ‘saving the planet’, ‘going green’ is perhaps the key political issue of our time. As consumers we are exhorted to recycle, bin our plastic carrier bags, use low-energy light bulbs, avoid driving in favour of public transport, bicycling or walking, buy local and so on. The ‘solution’ on offer is for all of us to do our bit, which mainly means switching our consumption patterns, rather than massively reducing our consumption. Does this really impact on what Lefebvre refers to as the ‘bureaucratic society of controlled consumption’? Meanwhile hectares of land hitherto used to supply the world with food (or as virgin tropical forest soaking up CO2) are turned over to the production of bio-fuel. A western lifestyle might be maintained but food prices are rising. ‘Dirty industries’ in Russia and expanding industrialisation in India and China are massively increasing the rate of carbon emissions in the atmosphere. No wonder that many are cynical about bothering to make any gesture towards going green. In de Certeau’s terms, what can the tactics of the weak achieve against the strategies of the strong? Who is responsible for the everyday of environmental change?
Some questions for discussion in the lesson:
• If, as Raymond Williams describes, one definition of the term culture is ‘way of life’ how profoundly might this ‘way of life’ have to change if modern daily life is to be sustainable?
• In what ways is the rhythm or habit of everyday life defined by waste, carbon-use or over-consumption?
• Should state and commerce implement changes before changes are demanded of individuals? What demands would you make of the state and corporations?
Week 9 ‘Making love’
This week we focus on the everyday expressions of love. It could be love between couples or friends, within families, between people and their things, people and their pets or even between fans and a star persona. Culturally specific, love is performed through routine practices – we might call it the work of love – as well as through grand gestures. In the west expressions of love are commodified – the Valentine card, the giving of expensive presents – but also marked by a gift exchange of small, seemingly insignificant objects invested with meaning and affect and by mundane practices of selfless devotion. Is this the poetics of love?
Some questions for discussion in the lesson:
• Daniel Miller (not in the extract you are reading) suggests that in contemporary society the infant or child has become an ‘object of contemporary devotion’ (1998: 124). In what ways do you recall such devotion from parents, grandparents or significant others? How did you respond to it?
• Is Tracey Emin’s art an art of the feminine everyday in which ‘making love’ is problematised?
Week 10 Escape attempts
In the modern world breaks from the everyday are institutionalised in the festive and often commercialised events like Christmas, Bank Holidays or saints’ days, and in the holidays conceded to workers (and students!). On a more regular basis, and itself routinised, the convention of the weekend, established in the period from the 1920s, also licenses some kind of escape. In this session we focus on the prosaic escapes built into the routine of a day, like the short break constituted by smoking a cigarette or consuming a chocolate bar (‘Have a break. Have a Kit Kat’) and on the night time or weekend escapes which upturn, exaggerate or re-deploy the fabric of the everyday (cf. Garvey’s account below of ‘drinking, driving and daring’) and which resonate with elements of what Bakhtin refers to as the ‘carnivalesque’.
Some questions for discussion in the lesson:
• What escape attempts do you practice in your own daily/weekly lives? Are they routinised? Shared with others? What are you escaping from?
• If the car has provided a vehicle of escape from the everyday (cf Hollywood road movies) what possibilities does the internet offer? (cf Microsoft’s promotion, ‘Where do you want to go today?’)
• Does the concept of ‘me time’ express an escape from the everyday?
