Spring 2002

Instructor: Dr. Michael LeVan

Office: CIS 3033

Office phone: 974-0788

Office hours: Tuesdays 1-2, Wednesdays 2-3 and by appointment

Email: mlevan@chuma1.cas.usf.edu

Mailbox: CIS 3058

Department phone: 974-2145

Course Description and Objectives

In this course we will examine interrelated issues of communication, culture, and community including the nature of community, the role of institutions in everyday life, the unique challenges of globalization, the nature of individual, social, and global privilege, the role of individual responsibility in communities and the world, and our own personal stakes in public and private life. Throughout the semester we will consider the ways in which communication constitutes, reproduces, sustains, repairs, alters, and transforms culture and communities. The perspectives we take will be experiential, philosophical, rhetorical, social constructionist, symbolic interactionist, historical, geographical, and political. This course satisfies an exit requirement in the category of major works and major issues.

Required Texts

Carbaugh, Donal. Situating Selves: The Communication of Social Identities in American Scenes. Albany: State U of New York P, 1996.

Sernau, Scott. Bound: Living in the Globalized World. Bloomfield: Kumarian, 2000.

Lingis, Alphonso. The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994.

Your “fourth text” will be the set of experiences you gain from weekly volunteer work with an off-campus community organization.

Volunteer Service

Everyone enrolled in this course must complete volunteer service with an off-campus community organization in order to pass this course. This service may take a variety of forms, but must be done weekly and with the same organization throughout the semester. This aspect of the course is non-negotiable.

Assignment: No later than Tuesday, February 4^th, submit a typed description of the place where you will be volunteering. Include a statement about the type of work you will be doing, the day(s) and times you are scheduled to volunteer, the reason you chose this particular organization, and what you expect to learn from the experience. In addition, you must include a letter from the contact person at the organization where you will be volunteering stating your agreement for volunteer work. This letter should include the name and phone number of the person who will be supervising your work. Students who do not submit this assignment, in full, by the required due date are advised to drop this course.

Course Assignments and Grading Policy

Journals and volunteer work 35%

W(h)ither Community? paper 20%

Group Project 20%

Community & Commitment paper 25%

*grades will be calculated and assigned using the plus/minus system.

The journals and volunteer work comprise the most significant part of your final grade. This is where the day-to-day, nuts-and-bolts of your experiences is played out. Your journal will include at least two entries each week. First, you will include a weekly reaction statement or reflection on that week’s reading assignments. This can include questions you want to raise of the text, disputes you have with the authors, extensions of the material you want to offer, or other general comments. Second, you will have a weekly discussion of your volunteer work describing what happened that week during your volunteer service, connections you are making between your readings and your volunteer experiences, your feelings toward this organization, and other comments or reflections related to the volunteer work. Consider these entries as field notes and research ideas that you may apply to your paper assignments.

Note: I will collect your journals periodically and without prior warning. This means that you should always keep your journal up to date and that you should always bring it with you to class. If you do not have your journal during a collection time, you will not receive credit for it at that time. Also, your entries should all be typed, and at least a full page in length each.

The two papers will be detailed considerations of specific issues of community, culture, and communication. The “W(h)ither Community?” paper asks two questions simultaneously: “Where is community and how is it given to us in experience?”; and “Has the experience of community been disintegrating and disappearing in contemporary times?” The “Community and Commitment” paper concerns your volunteer service by exploring issues of personal commitment, social and cultural reflection, and ethics. The first paper will be 4-6 pages in length; the second paper will be 8-10 pages. More details will be given later in the semester. The first paper is tentatively scheduled to be turned in February 26^th. The second paper is tentatively scheduled to be turned in by April 23^rd.

The group project will be the hypothetical development of a public space in Tampa for the purposes of building community. The objectives of this assignment are to work together, to discover several pressing questions about public space and the possibilities of creating community, and to try to solve problems in creative and insightful ways. Your end result will be a proposal that you will present in class. Group presentations are tentatively scheduled for February 28^th, March 5^th, and March 7^th.

FAQs

Q: Do I have to do the reading before the class meeting? A: Of course you do. Otherwise, discussion will be extremely limited and boring. Also, keep in mind that I may collect your journals at any time, so you need to be up to date with your reading anyway.

Q: Do I have to come to class? A: (attendance policy) I consider attending classes and completing reading assignments as the very minimum requirement of being enrolled in my course.

Q: Can I leave my cell-phone on? A: Only on wiggle-mode, and only during emergencies.
Q: Can I make up missed work? A: (make-up policy) Out of fairness to the classroom community, I do not accept late work or allow make-up assignments except for religious holidays and documented emergencies. In the case of religious observances, I must be notified prior to the observance (preferably at the beginning of the semester). In all other cases, please contact me as soon as possible so that arrangements can be made to keep you on track.
Q: Can I steal other people’s ideas? A: (policy on academic dishonesty and plagiarism) If you are using someone else’s ideas or words or research findings to help you make a point, you must acknowledge them. If you are using their exact words, you must quote them. If you are paraphrasing them, you still must acknowledge them. If you acknowledge your sources, this shows professors that you researched your topic. If you don’t acknowledge your sources, then you are plagiarizing (which means that you are guilty of academic dishonesty, also known as lying and cheating). For the exact university policies and definitions concerning plagiarism and academic dishonesty, see pages 12-14 of the 2001-2002 University of South Florida Student Handbook.
Q: How can I reach you? A: Email is best; a note or message in my box second; my office voice mail is third.

Reading Schedule (tentative)

Part One: Communication

January 8: syllabus

January 10: “what is community?”

January 15: read Situating Selves, preface and introduction

January 17: chapters 1 and 2

January 22: chapters 3 and 4

January 24: chapters 5 and 6

January 29: chapters 7 and 8

January 31: chapters 9 and 10

February 5: chapter 11 and appendix

February 7: begin group projects

Part Two: Globalization

Week of February 12^th: read Bound: Living in the Globalized World, chapters 1 and 2

Week of February 19^th: chapters 3 and 4

Week of February 26^th: chapters 5 and 6

Week of March 5^th: chapters 7 and 8

Part Three: Community and Commitment

Week of March 19^th: read The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common, preface, the other community, the intruder.

Week of March 26^th: faces, idols, fetishes

Week of April 2^nd: the murmur of the world

Week of April 9^th: the elemental that faces, carrion body carrion utterance

Week of April 16^th: community in death