Papers, Glaciers, and Listenings

You should be continuing to work on your final projects this week and weekend. I'd like you to bring an updated abstract, draft, outline, or whatever scribblings you have toward your final papers to class on Monday night.

Additionally, you should take some time to savor this final formal reading assignment for the semester. My hope is that Cruikshank's book brings together not only the themes we've been discussing all semester, but that it might help you think about your own projects in new ways as well.

After you've read the introduction, and worked through the chapters of your choosing from each section, please post your questions and answers here, per the usual routine.

Looking forward to reconnecting with you, and hearing about how your projects are coming along.

Happy weekending,

Kevin

Mock ASLE Abstracts

Post your 250-word ASLE paper abstracts here, and feel free to comment on other posts. Your abstracts should outline a set of concerns that you'd like to explore. 

They don't have to definitively conclude anything, yet, as you haven't written the paper.  Abstracts are often speculative and suggestive, which should feel relieving to you.  They are much like your blog posts in that they raise a particular question and articulate why it's important.  You read a hundred abstracts for the ASLE program assignment, so that should also give you a sense of how they are written.  And at the beginning of the semester, you scribbled out a freewrite-abstract, which you may or may not want to develop here.  Your hypotheses may change over the course of researching and writing the paper, which is fine!  

The paper doesn't have to be scholarly, either; you can propose a creative or poetic piece. 

My one strongest piece of advice: write what YOU WANT to write about. Think about a moment in class when you had a "huh, that's really interesting" moment, or when you got particularly angry or annoyed about something. Trust those instincts and start unraveling your thoughts about that issue by writing about it.... 

Questions or concerns? Email me!  Happy abstracting!

Hayes and Rozell

In class Monday, we will screen the film, Eating Alaska.  In preparation for that film, you're reading a short piece on food issues in Alaska by Ned Rozell.  Class will also be devoted to discussing Ernestine Hayes' two pieces.  Here are three options for your post:

1.  Given your own experiences about the topic of "food" in Alaska and your observations of the issue of food in popular culture more broadly, pose and respond to a question that you think captures Alaska's position within these discussions.  These questions and responses will help us frame our discussion about the film.

2.  Given our discussions about "traditional ecological knowledges" in our last class, pose and respond to a question that emerges from Hayes' writing for you.  How might these texts help you develop your own thinking about Alaska Native considerations of environment, culture, and place in a rapidly changing north, if at all?

3. Choose your own adventure: what kind of question might bring forward a shared concern between these two seemingly unrelated sets of readings?