Critical Selfies

  • Students took and shared selfies to launch a discussion on media, digital romance, and self-presentation
  • Students developed, amended, and resisted scholarship on selfies, introducing issues of remixing, filtering, and editing; irony and candidness; circulation; and video.

Re-titling “Black Box”

  • Students approached Jennifer Egan’s short story “Black Box” by composing alternative titles, and discussing the stakes of framing the story in different ways.

Photograph of blackboard with student-generated titles for Jennifer Egan's "Black Box"

Photograph of blackboard with more student-generated titles for Jennifer Egan's "Black Box"

Creative writing, extending Ken Liu’s “The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species”

  • Ken Liu’s story describes the storage media of various non-humanoid alien species, with section headings like: “The Allatians,” “The Tull-Toks,” etc.
  • In this exercise on the final section meeting of the course, students took 5 minutes to compose a new section of the story titled “The Humans.” This creative exercise was the starting point for our synoptic/concluding discussion of the course.