Welcome back, nerds. I wish to take this occasion to welcome you into a Joyous New Apocalyptic Year of 2012, one which probably no longer feels very New at all. It’s just more school. School’s a drag. Also, the whole 2012 thing is bullshit. Regardless, we carry on with classes starting tomorrow, and I’m totally gonna get trashed December 21st regardless. I hope you understand.
Anyway. You might recall last semester’s announcement that students were planning a student forum on the subjects of direct action and radical social theory, inspired by the recent Occupy movement and what was seen as a lack of institutional attention to alternative social theory. Using a syllabus based on the one anthropologist David Graeber drew up to teach a course on the same subject, we’re planning on having the participants themselves teach the course – each week, students will put together a discussion of the reading, viewing, and other material everyone will be engaging with.
Interested? Do one or both of the following: a) Show up to the interest and application meeting tomorrow, Thursday, at 7 PM in the UOC, where we’ll discuss our vision for the course and give out the application questions for all those interested. b) Contact someone involved in the planning of the forum – say, Jon Lubeck ’14 (jlubeck at wesleyan dot edu), Dan Fischer ‘11.5 (dlfischer at wes), or Maxwell Hellmann ’13 (mhellmann at wes) for more information and an app, when it’s ready.
Date: Thursday, January 26
Time: 7 P.M.
Place: UOC (190 High St., in between Beta and Eclectic)
Click through for a little more information about applying:
One of the key goals of the forum was to ensure that anyone who was interested could take it. That’s why the time of the course, for example, will be decided by a Doodle poll of all the applicants, from various times on Wednesday or Thursday evenings. We’ll pick the time that seems to work for the most interested parties.
You might be wondering why, if we want to make this course as open as possible – including, if they’re interested, students, professors, alumni & other Wes community members, Middletown residents – we have an application in the first place. The application isn’t really an application to join the forum – it’s an application for credit. The university’s student forum guidelines only allow for a small number of students to actually get credit for completing the course, and a few to have an audit on their transcript. But if more people want to participate than there are official university spots, we have to decide who gets institutional credit somehow. We ended up deciding to use applications for that process; they’ll all be sent to one person, who’ll remove the names from the applications in the interest of fairness before giving them to reviewers to decide who should get credit. Hopefully that makes sense to y’all – if not, bring it up at the meeting!