Class norms and project ideas

I have collected and posted our class norms for both sections of Utopias & Dystopias, which you'll find in the sidebar. Since both sections chose "Address people by their preferred names" as a norm, I thought I would also share my explanation of why I chose "Dr. Majerus" as my preferred teacher name, for anyone who's interested. I wrote this for Nonfiction Writing blog last semester, so if you were in that class, you may already have seen it.

To remind you of what the current parameters for our third quarter project are, here's what I came up with:

Your project should:

• Relate to utopias &/or dystopias from a historical, philosophical, &/or literary angle
• Involve research and draw on at least four solid sources (writers with individual expertise and/or institutional support)
• Give you an opportunity to practice your writing, public speaking, and/or communication/design skills

We can adjust this if you have ideas or arguments for more, fewer, or different parameters.

The possibilities are wide open for what you can do. Here are a few ideas that might either give you ideas for a direction or spark your thoughts on another direction:

Think about issues that Brave New World has brought up that you're interested in and propose a literary, cultural, or historical project that arises out of our reading so far––or a project that combines literary and historical, philosophical, and/or cultural ideas. Consider a comparison between BNW and another dystopia you've read, such at Lois Lowry's The Giver, or explore Huxley's interest in Native American culture and communities and consider where you stand on the question of racism and Huxley's representation of Pueblo community in New Mexico. (One source to consider: Indian Country Today's story "Is Huxley’s Brave New World Racist?")

Explore other literary utopias and/or dystopias and create a project that engages with a book we will be reading later in the year, one you've read in the past, or one you're currently reading. Check out the  Literary Utopias section of our Uni Library class projects page for help.

Look through The Utopias Reader to get a basic introduction to some historical Utopian communities like the Shakers, the Oneida community, or Brook Farm and other communities that followed the philosophies of Charles Fourier. Perhaps you'd like to explore one of these in greater detail, or perhaps you'd like to do research on other or more recent social experiments in creating a Utopian community. For help with this, in addition to other search tools at your disposal, you can check out the Historical and Environmental Utopias section of our class projects page.

If you're interested in more philosophical ideas related to utopias, you can explore some manifestos or philosophical frameworks for imagined or real utopias, such as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engel's Communist Manifesto (which is excerpted in ) or the work of Charles Fourier (excerpt linked above). You can also explore the Philosophical Utopias section of our class projects page.

There are many creative project possibilities that span a wide array of imaginative realms. Think about everything we've talked about so far in class, what you know about the books we'll be reading, what issues and ideas arise from discussions of utopias and dystopias, from our culture's current (and longstanding) interest in dystopia, ideas of educational experiment and reform, and anything else we have touched on or are likely to. The range of options is wide open. I'm interested in your ideas and visions.