What kinds of writing tasks and assignments await you once you have finished your degree and secured employment? How do various professions and industries compare in their uses of writing? How do the traditions, practices, and norms of specific workplace cultures inflect the writing of employees? In what ways do audiences within an organization and exterior to it figure into professional authoring processes? How do the skills and knowledge you have been developing at UHM mesh with professional writing expectations? We will form a learning community in this course to investigate these and other questions. During the first half of the semester, you will make weekly field trips to investigate a workplace of your choice, using techniques presented in a virtual fieldguide to take notes to be used for analysis. You will post observations and findings to Laulima, and participants will take turns leading discussion of their peers’ postings. During the second half of the semester we will read a number of texts from performance studies to help you theorize and re-interpret findings from the first half. Excerpts from classic texts on performance will be available in Laulima or accessible as virtual documents. To get a fuller sense of the scope of this undertaking, see “Performing Professionally as a Writer: Research Revival Vlogs” in College Composition and Communication Online, January 2012. Our course will be writing intensive, and flawless attendance will be vital.
Course Requirements
- Workplace Site Proposal
- Fieldnote Presentations
- In-process Memo
- Progress Reports
- Document Flow Analysis
- Interview Index and Selective Transcription
- Term Project Draft & Response to Peers
- Postings to Laulima
- Class Discussion Facilitation
- Term Project Final
Readings/Viewings
Carlson, Marvin. Performance: A Critical Introduction (selected excerpts)
Conquergood, Dwight. “Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research”
—. “Rethinking Ethnography: Towards a Critical Cultural Politics”
Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (selected excerpts)
Henry, Jim. A Field Guide to Workplace Culture Analysis (free pdf)
—.“Performing Professionally as a Writer: Research Revival Vlogs”
McKenzie, Jon. Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance (selected excerpts)
Schechner, Richard. Performance Theory (selected excerpts)
Other short readings as determined helpful, in pdf form on Laulima