Audience Bearing Witness and Exploring Mediated HistoryHaskell

Java Python Audience, Bearing Witness, and Exploring Mediated History

Questions to Answer and Submission Guidelines

Please Answer the Following Questions – Note that assignments must include answers to each question, fulfilling the word counts that follow each question, in order to be considered complete responses.

1. In all honesty and without a filter, write a paragraph indicating the ideas, belief, or associations that immediately come to mind when you think of “Canada”. These can be positive, negative, or both. You are even welcome to admit that you had never considered “Canada” or “Canadian-ness” before (though this seems unlikely, as whether we are born and raised in Canada or come here as students or immigrants, we usually have some ingrained conceptions of what Canada “is”). (100-200 words)

Note: Even if you offer initial ideas or positions that do not align with those offered by indigenous artists and scholars in this activity, you will not be judged (or evaluated) negatively for the response you give, as long as it is genuine and fulfills the assignment requirements. Most settlers of, visitors to, immigrants to, refugees seeking protection in, and descendants of settlers in Canada often live or visit here with lofty, idealistic, and overwhelmingly positive ideas about Canada and “Canadian-ness”, particularly because the history explored in this activity is not widely mediated outside of Canada, and it has only recently been added – at least in part – to aspects of domestic primary and secondary education within Canada.

2. What does it mean to “bear witness” in the context of an assignment like this one? Write one paragraph based on your pre-existing beliefs, and then a second paragraph after your review of the “Bear Witness” section of the Witness Blanket. In a third paragraph, respond to the following: Did your opinion/definition change? If so, how? If not, why not? (200-300 words)

3. Does the Witness Blanket function as a dominant, oppositional, or negotiated reading of Canada’s dominant historical mythology? Think back to your response to #1, above, and explain your reasoning. You may draw exclusively on the Witness Blanket, or you may bring Tricia E. Logan’s work into this conversation, as/if needed. (75-150 words)

4. After reading and listening to three items on the “Stories” page of the Witness Blanket website, briefly summarize each of the stories you explored. (30-50 words each)

a. What was most impactful or important about the content you witnessed? Did you have a different experience based on the media format of the stories (that is, the written vs. oral/visual statements)? (75-150 words)

5. Thinking back to Question 1, has your opinion of Canada/”Canadian-ness” changed, in part or in whole, as a result of completing this activity? Whether that has changed or not, what has impacted you the most in this activity – the stories found in the Witness Blanket, the scholarship of Tricia E. Logan and others, the artistic intentions expressed by Carey Newman and his team of volunteers, something else entirely? (50-100 words)

6. How does the dominant narrative of “Canada” compare to the Witness Blanket, the critiques offered by Tricia E. Logan, and the history around “Canadian-ness” or “Canadian identity”? What can this show audiences about the idea of history as a mediated concept and the place of oppositional interpretive modes in engaging all forms of media, from the concrete to the abstract? (100-150 words)

7. What is at stake in exploring this mediation of Canada’s history, including the dominant narrative of Canada and oppositional critiques of this narrative? Are there any lessons that come from this examination that we can apply to other aspects of history (within and/or beyond the Canadian context)? (75-150 words)

Note: Answers should be provided in sentence/paragraph form, not point-form, and should clearly and concisely answer the questions being asked. Please be economical in your word choice. Entries that are overly wordy, with artificially inflated word counts, may be subject to additional scrutiny. If you go 20-30 words over the limit for each question, that is acceptable. Answers that are more than 5-10 words less than the minimum number of required words per response will be subject to additional scrutiny.

Final Details

Due Date: October 3, 2024, 11:59pm (EST/Toronto Time).

Submission Format: Online Audience, Bearing Witness, and Exploring Mediated HistoryHaskell , through Quercus. Submissions may be typed into the submission panel, or students may upload a file in .doc, .docx, or .pdf format. No other formats will be accepted. If any other file type is submitted, the assignment will be marked incomplete.

Required Style: All responses should be written out in full. Please do not use point-form, bullets, or shortened form; write in full, complete sentences and paragraphs. Submissions in point-form. will be considered incomplete. Please do not include direct quotations longer than 1-2 sentences but note that quotations will not count toward the total word count for each question. Submissions that include more than 10% quoted content will be considered incomplete.

References: Students should not draw on outside resources as references in the assignment. You are welcome to make use of the Week 4 assigned readings for class and the materials in the “Required” and “Optional” resources lists in this assignment guide. When drawing on such resources, an informal citation* will suffice, such as the reference notes used throughout this assignment guide. You do not need to include a Works Cited/Bibliography/References page, as long as you only use resources listed in the resources list and readings from Week 4 in class.

*By “informal citation”, I simply mean references like the following:

“As Logan notes in, ‘Memory, Erasure, and National Myth’ (153)…”, or, “In the story, ‘Tree Branch’, on the Witness Blanket website…”, etc.

Plagiarism Detection: Unless you are using a short, direct quotation (1 sentence or less), the assignment should be written entirely in your own words. This includes indirect quotation and paraphrasing. Simply reproducing or rephrasing content from source materials will lead to an incomplete mark.

All submissions will be submitted to TurnItIn for plagiarism detection, as outlined in the syllabus. TurnItIn will compare all student submissions to one another, to all online source materials, and to all student assignments from past terms/years, and it will detect any direct or indirect copying.

Use of AI/ChatGPT and Similar Tools: Use of any artificial intelligence for composing submissions, in part or in full, qualifies as academic dishonesty and will be pursued as such. ChatGPT and similar language models create very poor, predictable work on prompts such as this guide, including generating nonsensical responses, responses that deviate highly from the instructions and ethos of the assignment, and painfully generic responses. Suspicion of AI use in completing this assignment, in part or in full, will result in a full investigation, a report being sent to the Academic Integrity Office, and an institutional probe into your submitted work to detect evidence of academic dishonesty.

Lastly, I am personally asking you, on a human-to-human level, not to do this. It would be profoundly disrespectful to the survivors of these historical atrocities and erasures to listen to their stories, hear of their trauma, their erasure, their strength and resilience, only to try to recruit a computer into devising a response. Please do not do this. It is not worth using such poor tools to complete such an important and potentially enriching project.

A final note on the ethos and purpose of this assignment: Aside from my own 2+ decade commitment to exposing the current and historical injustices committed against North American indigenous populations, there is so much to learn from this assignment regarding how information is mediated, transmitted, reported, filtered into formal education, shaped into nationalistic sentiment, etc., which extends far beyond the issues of indigenous peoples in Canada, or even MDSA10, in general. If you’ve ever wondered why the world is the way it is, with all its hatred, intolerance, war, discrimination, prejudice, violence, xenophobia, propaganda, manipulation, etc., this assignment is intended to give you a window into one way that this can happen over long periods of time, across major populations of even well-intentioned people. This is certainly not the only way such ideologies take root, but it’s an important example. As such, this assignment is designed to focus in on one specific situation, in order to give you some of the critical tools necessary to experience new viewpoints, and critically analyze the worldviews, ideologies, legal structures, memorials, commemorations, and national narratives that make genocide and genocide denial possible.

As global citizens, all of this will benefit you for years to come, on both personal and professional levels.

Please take that seriously