Sunday, January 12, 2014

Intro to Material Culture

I am going to looooooove this class called SOSC 301. It's mostly lecture, no tests, no group assignments and a few small assignments with a final project. Yay! The only reason I signed up for it was that I needed any SOSC class, and it was the earliest one available. Naturally it's too easy to get caught up in visual culture at an art college, so thinking about "stuff and where it comes from" as a macro level is really exciting.

We watched some slides by photographers who photographed people, their belongings, and sometimes both. The idea was to get a sense of who the person was from their belongings. Here's my purse contents:


purse


Our first assignment was to make a list of all the things in our bedrooms from memory. The second part is to actually make the list. The third part is to swap lists so that another student can draw inferences about us. Whoever gets mine is in for a puzzler :-D Another project is a "personal, reflective essay"..

The textbook for the class is Understanding Material Culture by Ian Woodward. I forked over $63 for a dead tree version. The Kindle versionw as $35...but the Android Kindle app is really finicky and I kind of need my book to be available :-D

5 comments:

  1. This is so cool! A truly fun class! Your purse is pretty tidy ;o) You have to tell us what is in your bedroom, that will be so puzzling! Thanks for changing the comments ;o) Happy New Year :o)

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  2. Thanks :-) It seems like a lot to me, but then I haven't looked at a lot of people's purses. I have a lot of toy horses and bird stuff in the bedroom (the toy horses kind of take over the whole house, eee!) .

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  3. Sounds like a fun class. Glad your enjoying it.
    Yes thank you for changing the comments, much much better. Hate the way Google Plus does it lol

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  4. So fun! I have always loved pictures of what's in people's bags. There are photostreams dedicated to this on Flickr.

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    1. Once you start looking at these kinds of pictures, it's easy to get hooked, My class is over now, thankfully, but I learned so much that will stay with me for a long time.

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