Social Issue and/or Social Practice Presentation This assignment in the seminar is an opportunity for you to demonstrate your reflections on your own scholarship and research through an oral presentation. Having studied together varied and differential narratives of race, this is your opportunity to present to all of us who have shared this class, a social issue or social practice which addresses some elements of race and how it is narrated. This may be an issue that has been on your mind, that, for example, makes you re-question, rethink and relearn. It may be one that outrages you, sobers you, or displaces you. This may also be a social practice with which you connect and discern insights of critical empowerment and agency. In an overarching way, this assignment additionally allows for an opportunity to create another kind of collective space in our learning-teaching environment to hear one another’s ideas in a more elaborate way and provide room for critical bearing witness, and for engagement through questions, comments and reflections. 1. For this presentation you will select a social issue or a cluster of social issues or a social practice or a clustering of them, which speak to particular narrative(s) of race or get at matters at work at the nexus of race and narration as framed above. 2. This social issue or social practice – past or contemporary – may be one that you think has been controversial, hidden, disguised, served as a source of empowerment or has implications for the larger social order or academic, curricular, and civic structures in ways that have been misrecognized or overlooked or which need more visibility. 3. In this formal oral presentation of your social issue or social practice you should indicate the theoretical approaches to race and the conceptual indices of narrativity that inform your analyses of the social issue or practice in focus. 4. You should indicate the ways in which your selected issue relates provides a site of self-questioning and reflexivity for you across layers of your learning, everyday living, self and relational understanding and your own sense of social location and positioning. Also, as you prepare, think for instance, about (inter) relationships to which we attend in our class, for example, the practical and the ethical; the structural and the subjective; the epistemological and the embodied; the political and the historical; and the consequential difference and connection between acting based on a retrospective understanding and based on one borne out of praxis. Remind yourself of our questions and objectives found on pages four and five of our original syllabi: 1) How is the concept of race developed? 2) Why has the concept of race been developed in the way it has been? 3) What is the role of historical events and visual and verbal images in this development? 4) What is the role of academic disciplines in this development? 5) What are the consequences of these disciplinary configurations and for whom? 6) Who benefits from this configuration of race? 7) How does narrativity as a concept, theoretical approach and lived logic and practice help in responding to questions 1 through 6? 8) How can we see and notice enactments of narrativity and racialization and their differential intersections in our lived lives and practices?
