Short Stories Grand Narratives
Emnenavn på Norwegian Bokmål:
Short Stories Grand Narratives
Credits:
10
Course code:
65 301
Level of study:
Master
Teaching semester:
2016 Autumn
Language of instruction:
English
Required prerequisite knowledge
A completed Bachelor in Landscape Architecture or Architecture.
Course content
Short Stories Grand Narratives is a theoretical course that discusses land use debates and challenges in the northern region of Norway. Designers, architects, and landscape architects often move seamlessly between observing, thinking, drawing, modelling, reading and writing. While focusing on reading and writing, this course reflects on the design process, and in particular how architects incorporate expertise and knowledge from other disciplinary fields in their projects.
The overall objective of the course is twofold; first, it aims at giving the students a positive writing experience and an opportunity to develop their ideas textually. Second, it aims to introduce different perspectives on the Arctic and Sub Arctic sea- and landscapes. Short Stories reflect both the student’s personal encounters, and local accounts and cases that reflect the fact that the Arctic is a populated environment where people tend to their diverse, everyday practices. Grand Narratives reflect the geopolitical significance of Artic territories, the drama in the unfolding of climate change, long historical lines, power structures, indigenous perspectives, landscape practices, and pressing contemporary issues in changing land use policies, centralization, and urbanization.
Learning outcome
a. Knowledge:
• Have basic knowledge and general overview of recent discourses of Arctic landscapes and the northern social and political contexts, including indigenous issues.
• Have a basic understanding of various literary genres in academic writing.
• Have knowledge of the politics of visual representation in the use of maps, photos, and diagrams.
b. Skills:
• Students will learn how to search for and find relevant and contextual knowledge
• Show ability to distinguish between qualitative and quantitative research information, and be able to combine knowledge from different sources in in their own academic and creative writing.
• Be able to critically analyse an academic text.
• Ability to develop personal strategies to keep updated and informed as discourses and political, economic, climatic, and cultural conditions change.
c. General competence:
• The students will train in theoretically informing their own explorations and personal experience.
• Insight into the process of writing an academic text.
• Ability to ask informed questions about of research information from other research fields.
• Experience with communicating their ideas effectively through their texts.
Working and learning activities
This course is organized as reading and writing group, with lectures and/or conversations about the literature once a week. One or two of the sessions will be out-door activities. The students are expected to participate in the discussions, and give short presentations of their text sketches. Towards the end of the semester every individual student hand in a short theoretical paper based on the course literature and grounded in an empirical example illustrated by one map and one image.
Work effort.
Lectures, tutorials, and reading/writing group activities have mandatory attendance at 80%.
It is mandatory to read and analyse the course literature.
Mandatory hand in of all designated deliverables.
Curriculum
Writing, Representation and cartography
Stuart Hall, Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. The Open University. Kapitlene: Introduction (1-12) og "The Work of Representation" 13-64, 1997
How to Talk About Things You Know Nothing About, By Keith Kahn-Harris, Published 05 Oct, 2009
http://www.architecturenorway.no/stories/other-stories/kahn-harris-2009/
Mapping
Bieke Cattoor and Perkins, Re-cartographies of Landscape: New Narratives in Architectural Atlases, The Cartographic Journal Vol. 51 No. 2 pp. 166–178, The British Cartographic Society 2014
James Corner, “The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention.” In Mappings, p. 213-52. ed. Denis Cosgrove. (Reaktion, London, 1999)
The Nordic countries
Michael Jones, Seasonal landscapes in Northern Europe. Diedut 3, Sámi instituhtta, Kautokeino 2004.
Nordregio, State of the Nordic countries 2016 http://www.nordregio.se/en/Publications/Publications-2016/State-of-the-Nordic-Region-2016/
Statistisk Sentralbyrå, The economy of the Arctic http://www.ssb.no/a/english/publikasjoner/pdf/sa112_en/sa112_en.pdf
Sámi culture
Harald Gaski, Indigenous Interdisciplinary Internationalism: The Modern Sami Experience, with Emphasis on Literature, in Circumpolar Ethnicity and Identity, ed. Takashi Irimoto and Takako Yamada, (SENRI Ethnological Studies, 2004)
Baglo, Cathrine, From Universal Homogeneity to Essential Heterogeneity: On the Visual Construction Of "The Lappish Race". Acta Borealia 2-2001. (17 s.)
Gaski, Harald. 2011. Song, Poetry and Images in Writing: Sami Literature. Nordlit, Vol.27. (21 s.)
http://www.ub.uit.no/baser/septentrio/index.php/nordlit/issue/view/155
Landscape
Gunhild Setten, Fusion or exclusion? Reflections on the practices of landscape and place in human geography. Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift. vol. 60, 2006.
Yrjö Haila, Our place at the table, The Architects’ Role in the Biosphere, Published 05 Jun, 2010, http://www.architecturenorway.no/questions/cities-sustainability/haila/
Anna Tsing, More-than-Human Sociality A Call for Critical Description, in Anthropology and nature
Ed. Kirsten Hastrup, Routledge, New York, 2013, p. 27-42
Jacob Meløe, Words and Objects, In: Publications from the Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen, 17/2005. Bergen, 1992, p. 109-141.
Jacob Meløe, The Two Landscapes of Northern Norway, In Inquiry 3/1988, p. 387-401.
Reindeer herding
Mikkel Nils Sara, Siida and Traditional Sámi Reindeer Herding Knowledge, The Northern Review 30 (Spring 2009): 153–178
Mikkel Nils Sara, Land Usage and Siida Autonomy, Arctic Review on Law and Politics, vol. 3, 2/2011 p. 138–158. ISSN 1891-6252
Kathrine Ivsett Johnsen, Land-use conflicts between reindeer husbandry and mineral extraction in Finnmark, Norway: contested rationalities and the politics of belonging, in Polar Geography, 2016
| Mandatory coursework | Presence required | Comment |
|---|---|---|
| Presence required | Not required | Lectures, tutorials, and reading/writing group activities have mandatory attendance at 80%. It is mandatory to read and analyse the course literature. Mandatory hand in of all designated deliverables. |
| Form of assessment | Grouping | Grading scale | Comment |
|---|---|---|---|
| Portfolio assessment (Vurderingsmappe) | - | Pass / fail | English reading and academic writing skills, as well as knowledge of Arctic conditions may be unequally distributed in the student group when we start the semester. Written material will be evaluated by external sensor, and the student’s personal progress, oral participation in discussions, and willingness to help each other with overcoming obstacles will be taken into consideration. |
| Workload activity | Comment |
|---|---|
| Lectures | Lectures, tutorials, and reading/writing group activities have mandatory attendance at 80%. |