WRDS 151 Winter Session Term 1 – Course Topics

Instructor: Susan Blake

Sections: 030

Available Times: 11:00 – M/W

“Language is the most massive and inclusive art we know, a mountainous and anonymous work of unconscious generations.”

Edward Sapir (1921, p. 220)

In this section of WRDS 151 students will explore the types of questions and lines of inquiry pursued by language researchers in Anthropology, Education, First Nations Studies, and Linguistics. Through a series of academic readings, writing-intensive exercises, and opportunities for discussion and critical response, students will have a framework in which to develop their own questions about language and learn about the research and writing practices of language researchers across the disciplines. How do language researchers from different disciplines formulate research questions? What kinds of data do they incorporate in scholarly journal articles? How are the data and their research findings presented in written form? What are the formal properties of their scholarly writing?

This course focuses on corpus construction and discourse analysis (method) & provides relevant examples from research articles in the Humanities and Social Sciences as a point of departure.

Students will build their own working corpus (research articles on a particular topic) and analyze this textual material. They will have opportunities to draft and revise and present their own original research findings in both oral and written forms. Research will be carried out either collaboratively (2-3 students per research team) or individually (1 student per team), and provides students with opportunities to reflect on their own research and writing practices, as they become apprentice members of different research communities on campus.

Instructor: Rohan Karpe

Sections:   151, 181

Available Times:   1:00, 4:00 - M/W/F

In this WRDS 150 section we explore behaviours, norms, and behavioural change.

We have voluntarily adopted some of these behaviours, norms, and changes; some have been enforced, and still others have been influenced by those around us. These behaviours, norms, and changes appear at personal as well as at societal levels. How do various disciplinary researchers study behaviours, norms, and behavioural change. What research writing practices do they engage in to communicate their findings about behaviours, norms, and behavioural change? Using peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles, writing exercises, discussions, and critical feedback on writing assignments, you will be able to construct your own text-based research proposal and research paper on a behaviour, norm that you’re keen to study. Your paper will assist keen readers to change their understanding of your chosen topic.

Instructor: Dilia Hasanova

Sections:  110, 111, 121

Available Times:   8:00, 9:00, 10:00 - M/W/F

WRDS 151 introduces undergraduate students to academic research and writing practices. By reading a range of texts across disciplines and conducting a variety of writing exercises, students learn how to recognize and interpret methods of academic scholarship, and how to incorporate these methods into their own writing.

In this section of WRDS 151, we will explore the role of language in the construction of social identities. The course will focus not only on social factors that contribute to construction of multiple identities but also on how aspects of everyday language relate to social categorizations, such as class, age, gender, and ethnicity. The course also aims to broaden your understanding of language and society from sociolinguistic and sociocultural perspectives. The assignments (in-class and homework) will provide you with the opportunity to study current theories and debates in the field and to reflect on your own experience as a language user in a multicultural society.

This course will be a combination of interactive lectures, case studies, and in-class activities. The lectures will present information on basic linguistic concepts and how culture affects language. The in-class activities will allow you to put the information and skills you learn into practice. The activities require active engagement by students. You will be expected to contribute ideas and participate in active learning.

Instructor: Alexis McGee

Sections:  040

Available Times:  12:30 - M/W

This course investigates the importance of voice as it is composed through a variety of forms. What does it mean to read voice within texts? How do we listen to voices? How can we craft voice when we write? In addition to seeking answers to these questions, this course builds working definitions for the features defining voice, loosely, by engaging with scholarly conversations across discourses (sociolinguistics, writing studies, postcolonialism, etc.). By the end of this course, students should be able to identify, develop, and understand of how voice can be used rhetorically.

Instructor: Diane Burgess

Sections:  031, 032, 033

Available Times:   8:00, 10:00, 12:00 W/F

With their hashtags, newsfeeds, and status updates, social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook have become ubiquitous in our daily lives, blurring the boundaries between personal and professional networks and impacting how we gather and disseminate information. At the same time, micro-blogging has altered the public sphere, challenging journalistic norms and influencing potential forms of political engagement. By definition, social media are both networking technologies and information conduits. Drawing examples from media studies, psychology, journalism and political science, this section of WRDS 150 explores how scholars approach the qualities of social networks, their uses and their users.

Instructor: Jennifer Cowe

Sections:  131, 141, 161, 171

Available Times:   11:00, 12:00, 2:00, 3:00 - M/W/F

This course will aim to explore how different academic disciplines engage with the concept of nostalgia. Nostalgia is a word, or more usually a feeling, that most people have used or felt; however, very few understand its constant presence in everyday life. We will study nostalgia from its earliest appearance in academia as a form of mental illness in the seventeenth century and follow its growing influence over, and manipulation of, contemporary ideas of national identity, consumerism, class, social media and the environment. We will attempt to understand how the politics of memory, belonging and collective remembrance reflect and inform current political discourse.

Instructor: Adrian Lou

Sections:  152

Available Times:  1:00- M/W/F

Traditionally, metaphor has been understood as a stylistic device that poetically decorates language. Metaphorical expressions (e.g. my love is a rose) are thus thought to be statements that do not reside in the realm of everyday speech. However, contemporary research in cognitive linguistics has shown that many conventional expressions are inescapably metaphorical. Consider, for instance, how we rely on metaphors to talk about abstract concepts, such as love (e.g. you’re breaking my heart), illness (e.g. the patients are battling cancer), and time (e.g. we’re running out of time). In this course, we will read academic articles that evaluate the use of metaphors in biology, healthcare, psychology, Indigenous studies and politics in order to have a better understanding of how metaphors shape the way we think about the world around us. Ultimately, students in WRDS 150 will learn how to read academic papers in a critical way, identify the rhetorical strategies used in academic writing, and write an original research paper that draws upon ideas and concepts from the course.

Instructor: Meredith Beales

Sections:  050, 060

Available Times:   2:00, 3:30 - M/W

In The Lion King, on the BBC, on stages and classrooms around the world—the work of William Shakespeare is often encountered as a classroom text, theatre, or film.  But Shakespeare is now also used as inspiration for academic research ranging from history and film studies to archeology, mathematics, and cognitive science.  In this class, we will examine how this one sixteenth-century English playwright has galvanized research in a variety of disciplines beyond the traditional starting point of English literature.  We will ask why this particular writer has such a large impact on academic study, and whether, in research on, for example, supernovae or twenty-first century Afghan politics, Shakespeare has much to do with the research at all.  Does simply adding the name Shakespeare make it more likely to be taken seriously?  Does it matter that the motivation for an archeological dig comes from trying to prove Shakespeare wrong?  What, if anything, does Shakespeare have to do with the research done in his name?

No prior knowledge of Shakespeare is expected, nor will we be reading his literature (the plays or poems themselves) in WRDS 150.

Instructor: Louis Maraj

Sections:  311

Available Times:   9:30 - T/R

How does who we are shape the knowledge we produce and engage in the world? In what ways do institutions, cultures, and media give us ideas about how we should and shouldn’t think of ourselves and those around us? And what roles do language and communication play in developing our perceptions of who can make scholarly knowledge? In this course, participants will survey a variety of artifacts that engage ideas about identity and identity formation drawn from a number of strains of thought—including rhetorical studies, gender and sexuality studies, sociology, poetics, and cultural studies. We will think deeply about the politics of representation in how these artifacts communicate for scholarly audiences, while developing projects that actively acknowledge, address, and apply our own identity positions in research.

Instructor: Kimberly Richards

Sections:  001, 002, 003, 004

Available Times:   8:00, 9:00, 11:00, 12:00 - M/T/R

From public apologies issued by politicians for historical violences to theatrical strategies activists deploy to draw attention to injustice, performance is an important mode and medium of political communication. In this course, we will study some of the ways that political actors use performative strategies on stage and in everyday life with real consequences in the world. We will examine how diverse actors use scripts, choreographies, rehearsal practices, acting strategies, stage design, and recording technologies to persuade audiences of their righteousness, legitimacy and authority, and gain social, cultural, political and/or economic power in the process of doing so. We will observe how scholars working in social movement studies, critical Indigenous studies, discourse studies, celebrity studies, gender and women’s studies, and critical media studies describe, analyze, interpret and critique how power is gained, invoked and maintained through performance analysis. Doing so will help us to become more attentive and engaged citizens.

Instructor: Jennifer Gagnon

Sections: 371

Available Times: 7:00 - T -- online

Instructor: Meredith Beales

Sections:  322, 332

Available Times:   11:00, 2:00 - T/R

In The Lion King, on the BBC, on stages and classrooms around the world—the work of William Shakespeare is often encountered as a classroom text, theatre, or film.  But Shakespeare is now also used as inspiration for academic research ranging from history and film studies to archeology, mathematics, and cognitive science.  In this class, we will examine how this one sixteenth-century English playwright has galvanized research in a variety of disciplines beyond the traditional starting point of English literature.  We will ask why this particular writer has such a large impact on academic study, and whether, in research on, for example, supernovae or twenty-first century Afghan politics, Shakespeare has much to do with the research at all.  Does simply adding the name Shakespeare make it more likely to be taken seriously?  Does it matter that the motivation for an archeological dig comes from trying to prove Shakespeare wrong?  What, if anything, does Shakespeare have to do with the research done in his name?

No prior knowledge of Shakespeare is expected, nor will we be reading his literature (the plays or poems themselves) in WRDS 150.

Instructor:

Sections:  321

Available Times:   11:00 - T/R

Instructor: William Green

Sections:  341, 381

Available Times:  3:30 - T/R, 7:00 - R - online

WRDS 150 prepares you to understand, and participate in, the discourse practices employed by the university community in disseminating the results of research activities. Research writing exhibits a number of characteristics which are shared across disciplinary boundaries, constituting a distinct genre. This course will provide you with experience in recognizing the genre conventions and expectations of research writing through reading published professional scholarship in a range of fields, and in practicing deploying the rhetorical features of research writing through creating communications which detail the results of your own research project. This section of WRDS 150 focuses on the calculation of time. We will read a range of papers concerning the calculation of time from a variety of fields. Over the course of the term, you will complete a series of assignments, each building upon the next, to complete a research project dealing with the language and rhetoric of papers in a discipline of your choosing.