WRDS 150A

Academic Laugh Tracks: Reading and Writing Humour Studies

Typically, sections of WRDS 150 are designed around a research topic — a concept or issue that has attracted both public interest and scholarly attention. In this section of WRDS 150, we will focus on the commonplace but nonetheless complex phenomenon of humour from several disciplinary perspectives, including but not limited to psychology, social media studies, and cultural studies.

We will consider how scholars in these disciplines study and talk about humour. For example, what do these scholars say about humour’s functions and effects? More specifically, what might psychologists say about humour’s role in attraction and mate selection? What might cultural studies researchers say about humour’s role in the maintenance of normative social identities? What might social media studies scholars say about how humour can act as a form of resistance, a means of cultural persuasion, or a means of social participation and belonging? More importantly, how do scholars in these disciplines produce knowledge about humour – what methods do they use? And, most importantly, how is this knowledge-making activity represented in their writing?

WRDS 150B

Academic Laugh Tracks: Reading and Writing Humour Research in STEM fields

Typically, sections of WRDS 150 are designed around a research topic—a concept or issue that has attracted both public interest and scholarly attention. In this section of WRDS 150, we will focus on the commonplace but nonetheless complex phenomenon of humour from several disciplinary perspectives, including but not limited to neuroscience, computer science, and health sciences.

We will consider how scholars in these disciplines study and talk about humour. For example, what do these scholars say about humour’s scientific and technical functions and effects? More specifically, what might scholars in health sciences say about humour’s role in the maintenance of health or its role in health messaging? What might neuroscientist say about negative and positive humour styles and brain response? What might computing science scholars say about the social and cultural functions of humor bots? More importantly, how do scholars in these disciplines produce knowledge about humour – what methods do they use? And, most importantly, how is this knowledge-making activity represented in their writing?

WRDS 350

  Knowledge-making in the disciplines: cultures, discourses & Identities

 Our course provides a unique opportunity for you to engage in the study of your discipline’s knowledge-making practices and the uses of language that both represent and enact these practices. What does this mean? Well, it means a number of things. First and foremost, this is an advanced scholarly writing course.  In it, you will learn about and produce a range of research genres that represent the university’s ways of using language (e.g. as seen in research proposals and peer-reviewed research articles). So, yes, you will learn how to produce scholarly texts – or, for some of you, refine your understanding of how to do so.

But more importantly and perhaps more interestingly, this course invites you to consider why we produce texts in the ways that we do, to consider questions about the contexts that shape researchers’ motives for communicating and for communicating in specific ways.

This course recognizes that while you are not a newcomer to scholarly practice, you may not be familiar with your discipline’s practices as discursive practices, as ways of knowing, thinking, speaking, writing, and of being.  So, to answer questions you may have about why we do what we do, we will draw on current theories of and methods for analyzing scholarly communication: discourse theory, new rhetorical genre theory, and corpus-supported applied linguistics. This list may appear a little daunting. Not to worry. The aim of this course is to introduce you to the analytic frameworks that researchers, interested in the examination of disciplinary discourses, use.

In short, I’m inviting you to see yourself as an anthropologist of sorts, one who examines scholarly texts as cultural artifacts that can tell you something about the contexts that inform textual production in the disciplines.  Along the way, we will interrogate the university—the systems and cultures that produce these artifacts—and your place in it.