Critique: Pandemic! A Winter Intensive.
Yesterday was the last day of our Winter Intensive (a whole semester’s worth of material crammed into two weeks) called Beyond Chaos – Critique: PANDEMIC! According to the course description from convenors Prof. Desmond Manderson and Dr. Nick Cheesman, it is “not about the Coronavirus pandemic itself. It is, rather, a response to it. The goal of the course is not to provide, distill and analyze data on current affairs. It is to create breathing space between daily events and our thinking and speaking about them, so as to come up with other terms with which to address pandemic.” We discussed readings from books, academic journals, news and opinion articles, podcasts and even art work, with themes that included race, technology, care, work, quarantine, empire, democracy, university, law, emergency, modernity, epidemiology, pathology and politics – taken singly, or juxtaposed with each other.
I enjoyed this subject because:
- It was interdisciplinary (about ⅔ of the class of 30 were law, political science and philosophy students; the rest of us were studying engineering, public health, anthropology, environmental studies, indigenous studies, security studies, international relations, etc.) – it was great listening to the perspectives of many other students in a diverse set of fields;
- We had a lot of good discussion about the pandemic’s non-medical non-science aspects; and
- I have one less subject for this academic year’s second semester, since I completed this class over the winter break.
The course was challenging, especially with the analytical law/politics/philosophy readings. People are talking about critical theory and standpoint theory… and I had no idea what they were, other than my quick wikipedia lookups during class. I had nothing to contribute. But it is a good example of “being in a room where everyone is smarter than you” makes for a good learning environment. I definitely felt I did not have a law/politics/philosophy training (nor do I have more than a passing interest). While I was not able to offer too much in the verbal discussion most of the time, it was fascinating to listen to those who did have something to say about the themes and topics we tackled. I was also thankful for millennial group mates who were digital natives – they actually knew what what to do with regard to the group project of creating a 10-minute video for class based on the discussion themes for the day.
Read more about the course here (including a link to the syllabus).
I have one more assessment task for this course, writing a final essay which I hope to get done before semester 2 starts in a few weeks… then I’ll be in the home stretch of this master’s degree journey.
Final note: class was held in this big airy multipurpose 6th “superfloor” in the Marie Reay Student Commons (see first picture) so we had nice views of campus: click here and here to view photos.
