Singapore Studies: Examining Local Lives
Singapore Studies: Examining Local Lives
Module Description
Module Description
This module asks you to consider some engaging ways in which analysts can examine, then communicate, a Singaporean life that may or may not be human. One question that guides our inquiry is, what makes an examination local, global, or something in between? Another question is, how does this module test, and possibly build up, your readiness for the life that you will lead after university? A guide as we begin is Edward Tufte. ‘Science and art have in common intense seeing’, he counsels in Beautiful Evidence (2006). We will practise ‘the wide-eyed observing that generates empirical information’ (9). But we will reflect, also, to ‘see’ more.
This module welcomes inquiring minds by asking you to pay attention: to notice. We move from there to accounts by people who are alert noticers and, in some cases, critical noticers. You are tasked to transfer some of the skills that their projects model to your data collection, data examination, and then audience-tuned communication. After practice in these areas, we add a few ‘things to think with’: provocations that may turn into enhancements. By these steps, you develop a preliminary project, then develop the results into quite a bit more.
This module directs your attention to perspectives that differ from yours. As a group, you are tasked to help each other to be thoughtful about how and why people learn, then put learning to use.
No exams in this module; all grading is CCA.
Syllabus
Syllabus
Week One how to tell the tale
First meeting: local, global, in between? Second meeting: Jahren & Hoare excerpts
Study two science writers’ communication methods, grasping that in USE2321, we distinguish ‘science writing’ from ‘scientific writing’. An obvious difference is that scientific writing targets experts. Jahren and Hoare add an angle, though: the writer him- or herself as an observer or commentator.
Week Two transmission & resistance
First meeting: Liew Second meeting: Joseph & Chaplin
Your Singapore-based project about something non-human is due on Thursday at 4:59 p.m. Hard-copy only, at my office. Early submission is fine. I penalize late submissions, barring an MC, in your class participation grade. Looking for a model? Study Jahren, Hoare and this link:
https://www.criticalzoologists.org/singapore_veryoldtree/index.html
The reason that the models all reference science, in some way, is simple: in this project, you will not metaphorize the concept ‘life’ as people do with phrases such as ‘the life of a building’ or ‘an idea’s life’.
Week Three words +
First meeting: Kukkonen Second meeting: Adams
Saturday by 11:59 p.m.: post 300 to 400 words that explore one of Tufte’s claims and/or that teach the claim with a visual. This project is part of your class participation grade because it prepares later work.
(friendly tip: since the Tufte reading is on e-reserve at the Yale-NUS library, plan ahead about when you will read it)
Week Four CNY and ‘dance your’
Your oral history is due Thursday at 4:59 p.m. Hard-copy only, at my office. Early submission is fine. In grades for this project, I penalize late submissions, barring an MC.
Week Five First meeting: ‘dance your' Second meeting: ‘dance your’ if needed
Week Six provocations
First meeting: Roudemetof Second meeting: TBA
Week Seven teaching stints
Week Eight teaching stints
By 4:59 p.m. on Thursday, submit proposal for your final project.
Week Nine {g}localizing lives
First meeting: Koh Second meeting: ‘there’s a reason’:
Week Ten teaching stints if needed
Week Eleven teaching stints if needed
Week Twelve wrap-up
Your final project is due on Thursday at 4:59 p.m. Hard-copy only, at my office. Early submission is fine. I penalize late submissions, barring an MC, in your grade for this project.
Assessments
Assessments
0% writing a non-human life
20% oral history, Singapore-based
20% ‘dance your’ project, including written component
25% teaching stint
25% final project: develop earlier assignment + cover letter
10% class participation
These sketches help you find your way into the module. I will upload fuller instructions in time for you to draft recursively.
Writing about something non-human (individual, graded as class participation)
In this assignment, you study three write-ups of intense seeing: Jahren, Hoare, and the link. First, analyze how at least two of these communicators reach out to non-expert audiences. Then, consider how each presents non-human lives. To put your findings from this consideration to work, write about a local non-human life by making insightful use of two of the syllabus sources listed in the first sentence of this overview. Figure out where and how your local-ness comes in, to readers’ benefit.
To remind you that this assignment is a good place to venture, I do not grade it. Thus, in-depth knowledge of the non-human life is no issue. If you treat this project as a low-pressure way in which to help me find out how or what you notice, you are on a path to mindful work. Please ponder even so, as you draft, a readership beyond me alone. Pending your input, I suggest that you treat this project as part of an application for an interdisciplinary overseas study opportunity in which others’ expertise in non-human lives as biologists study such things, will be limited or none.
Word limit: 600 to 1,000. You may include a visual element, if you think one pertinent. Avoid mere decorative effect: the goal is to add value (hmm, of which sort?).
If you enjoy challenges, I will prefer projects on a non-mammalian, and non-bird, life that may be a hard ‘sell’ locally: wasps, for instance, or a sharp barnacle; a viper or hard-to-shift mold; a lizard that creates mess … you get the idea. You may consult with me about possible topics. Just remember: in this assignment, you may not metaphorize the concept ‘life’.
Oral history (individual, graded as a project)
For this project, you interview a Singaporean citizen or a long-term resident: eight years’ residence, minimum. Then, you communicate your discoveries in writing. One option is for you to ask about this person’s life. If you believe that this person’s life has interest beyond friends and family, your project must ‘make that case’. Your task can be understood as articulation, a word that denotes clarity, typically, but which we also use to discuss add-ons such as an articulated arm. Feibelman may be a guide. If you go this route, be sure to supply the contextualizing information that will help a non-local to understand your history. Your audience is undergraduate students in Norway.
However, you have a second option: you may interview a person about a commented-on local life, to find out what he or she knows about it, how she or he values it, and where a life-writer might intervene. Thus, if you interview a Singaporean about people such as Elizabeth Choy, members of the British Club, Dr William Tan, or Jayawardena Mudiyanselage Sittama Jayawardena, you may find much knowledge or little knowledge, notable investment or scant, emphasis on a sliver of the life or a wider slice, and so on. Similarly, if you ask about a nearby community garden, or honeybees, you may find much knowledge or little, notable investment or scant, emphasis on a sliver or a wider slice, and so on. If you go this route, your project may reflect on information-transmission to your interviewee. Audience: undergraduate students in Norway.
For this project, word limits are 800 to 1,200. Include a visual element, if you like, or an aural one.
Teach Tufte (individual, graded as class participation)
In 200 to 400 words, that you post on IVLE, state one of Tufte’s core lessons briefly, then teach the lesson to a 16-year-old. Feel free to use visuals to teach. But if you do use one or more visuals, you may not use a software or a ‘wizard’ to design the visuals. Make your own. I will not grade the quality of your drawing, collage, photograph, or whatever. Here again, therefore, I urge you to venture: even if you can’t draw well, model clay expertly, make marvelous paper art, or or or … you can still enjoy working with your hands.
Dance your … (collaborative, graded as a hands-on project)
This project adds group movement. When you narrate your learning experience, though, you work alone. Participation in 4 to 5 minutes of dance: 10% of your final grade in this module. 600-word write-up of what you learned by planning the dance, rehearsing, performing, and so on: 10% more.
Working in teams of no fewer than five students, you will dance whatever you decide to tell us about how your learning in FOP, WCT, USS, QR, NS, study abroad, an internship, or community service. If you conjure up a topic that is not on this list, check with me before you choreograph. Since I will not allow all topics, be ready with justification which is in line with our module. The information that your group tries to transmit must be complex enough to require thought about your choice of visuals or music, plot, characterizations, and so forth.
You have the option to make a video of your dance or to dance ‘live’ in class. You are responsible for making the results available in class with existing projection equipment. I will not grade the quality of the dancing. But I will look for commitment and rehearsed movement. We also need the filming skill to be good enough to discern the movements, verbal cues, and so forth.
Examples to consider:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0liMfnVE-8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SeX0YW1TxP4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51IY5XhdJR8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Xz2WlyZdCE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWj-50qYmDM
Teaching stint (collaborative, graded as a practicum)
The word ‘stint’ means a short allotment of time. In a teaching stint, each trio takes full responsibility for teaching our class to examine a local life for 20 minutes, then handling Q&A for 10 more. Think about the difference between presenting and teaching, as you plan. Each stint will examine a local life, individual or collective. No life may be a member of the USP community: we are trying to add to what we know or can learn easily. Each stint will address local/global/glocal. I encourage you to work with Tufte’s input too. Definitely though, I require two thoughtful visuals. You may not use Powerpoint, Prezi, or the like. Finally, each stint may draw on assigned materials but must work with input from Cooper OR Midgley OR these paired links:
https://www.wired.com/2011/05-/ff-angelsshare/ and https://www.theguardiancom/science/2012/apr/05/favourite-science-writing-whiskey-fungus
Examples: a trio can teach about Charlie Chan Hock Chye or Jurong My Love (I allow up to three stints on each if every trio blazes its own trail, using different secondary sources); or about Pulau Brani interviews or a similar data-set, historical or contemporary; or about your visit to a local organic farm or your observational report of NUH laboratory life; or about varied visitors’ reactions to a life on exhibition at our Natural History Museum or the Reef Ecology Lab. A trio may also find an engaging way in which to teach the life of a glocal contemporary or an historical individual, real or imagined. A trio may also find an engaging way to teach a local and global non-human life (e.g., mangroves) in which scientific expertise is balanced with stinters’ sense of individual use or take-up. This list is partial. I am open to your proposals.
Since I may decline a proposal, be ready with justification.
Friendly tip: Tufte was a statistician before he was a visuals expert. Thus, it may be bright to find quantified information that will inform your stint, first.
Final project (individual, graded as analytical work)
Your final project has two parts. One part will examine a global-g/local life, human or non-human, by learning from Tufte (required). You will also work with critical thought on locality plus one of the stint essay-options: Midgley or Cooper. You are free, of course, to work with other syllabus sources, too. Back to requirements: in this final project, you develop an earlier one: your writing about something non-human, your oral history, and so forth. Word limits for this part of the final project are 1200 to 1600, excluding the ‘Works Cited’ list. This part of the final project is worth 3/5 of the grade = 15% of your final grade for the module.
You submit a proposal, 300 words max, for this part of the project on Thursday of Week Eight. Upload by 4:59 p.m. or drop off a hard-copy at my office. Wait for approval, please, because some proposals may not fly.
Example: prepare teaching materials suitable for Sec 2 students on three Singapore Memory projects with a common topic or localization. Example: for readers of the Sunday Straits Times, write about a local goat farm (and/or the people who own or operate it), including your experience of visiting the farm. Example: for a display in Cinnamon, ‘journal’ the Tufte chapter with an eye on locality that calls for appropriate musical accompaniment and/or visuals that you design. Example: for an undergraduate research symposium in Mexico at which people will know little or nothing of Singapore, create a conversation between Liew’s book and Koh’s which draws on Jahren or Hoare.
You may like to write for an audience that does not use English. I see merit to doing so. But for assessment, you need to give me a translation.
Now, the second part of this assignment. In 400-600 words, explain to an interviewer for an internship, job, or post-graduate study, how USE2321 contributes to your readiness for the opportunity. By counting for 2/5 of this assignment’s weightage, this part tots up to 10% of your final grade.
Readings
Readings, partial list
Adams, Jeff (2008). “The pedagogy of the image text: Nakazawa, Sebald and Spiegelman recount
social traumas,” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 29, 35-49.
Chaplin, Elizabeth (2006). “The convention of captioning: W. G. Sebald and the release of the captive
image,” Visual Studies 21, 42-53.
Cooper, Brenda (2016). "`Eight chickens' ... `and there was this goat'," Wasafiri, 31, 12-17.
Feibelman, Peter J. (2011). A Ph.D. Is Not Enough: A Guide to Survival in Science. New York: Basic.
Hoare, Philip. (2014). The Sea Inside. Brooklyn and London: Melville, House.
Jahren, Hope (2016). Lab Girl: A Story of trees, science and love. London: Fleet.
Jenkins, Henry (2011). “Transmedia 202: Further Reflections,” Confessions of an Aca-Fan
http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2011/08/defining_transmedia_further_re.html
--- (2007). “Transmedia Storytelling 101,” Confessions of an Aca-Fan
http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2007/03/transmedia_storytelling_101.html
--- (2016). “Transmedia What?” https://immerse.news/transmedia-what-15edf6b61daa
Joseph, Michael (2012). “Seeing the Visible Book: How Graphic Novels Resist Reading,” Children’s
Literature Association Quarterly 37, 454-67.
Klaehn, Jeffery (2015). “Synergy and synthesis: an interview with comic book creator Ben Marra,”
Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 6, 284-92.
Koh, Dan (2018). Jurong My Love. SubStation: Discipline the City 03.
Kukkonen, Karin (2011). “Comics as Test Case for Transmedial Narratology,” SubStance 40, 34-52.
Liew, Sonny (2015). The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye. Singapore: Epigram.
Midgley, Mary (1983). "Duties Concerning Islands: Of Rights & Obligations," Encounter 60, 36-42. Available online.
Pelligrini, Ann (2007). “Unnatural Affinities: Me and Judy at the Lesbian Bar,’ Camera Obscura 22,
127-33.
Roudemetof, Victor (2016). "Theorizing Glocalization: Three Interpretations," European Journal of Social Theory, 19, 319-408.
Rushdie, Salman (1992). “A Short Text about Magic,’ The Wizard of Oz. London: British Film
Institute: 24, 26-7, 30, 33-5.
Scudder, Samuel H. (1874). "In the laboratory with Agassiz," Every Saturday. Available online.
Tufte, Edward (1997). Excerpts from Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and
Narrative. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press.
