Hi folks. We have a midterm exam on Thursday, Aug 25. This exam will ask you to show what you’ve learned so-far in the course, and push you to think about topics in new ways. The exam will ask you to identify the definitions of key terms we’ve used in the course, and offer examples of these terms in action. The exam will also ask you to reflect on the significance — politically, personally, academically– of these concepts.
In this post I’ve offered a few concepts and terms that you should know from the first two weeks. In the comments section of this post you can add new terms or ask clarifying questions about the ones I’ve listed.
KEY TERMS:
ideology (of course!)
six definitions of popular culture
naturalization/denaturalization
nature as meaning vs nature as resources
social construction
tropes
signs– icon, index, symbol
incorporation
excorporation
feminized nature/ naturalized woman tropes
wilderness
environmental justice
intersectionality
close reading
Sturgeon’s six tropes/patterns of nature (pg 25)
Frontier Myth
Pioneer
nature and the natural
trope of the “Noble Savage”
By ‘close reading’ do we need to have a definition of what it is, or be prepared to do one?
BOTH! But more the practice than the coherent definition, I’d say.
Which reading talked about incorporation/excorporation? I know it was one of the earliest ones, but I can’t find it.
It’s in Chapter 1 of Sturgeon. Storey also talks about the same thing using slightly different terms (off the cuff I believe he uses “dominant” and “excorporative”)
What do you mean by the term ‘intersectionality’? What is a cultural text example of this?
Hope today helped clarify this a bit– we’ll continue to work with this, like ideology, trope, and narrative, in the latter half of the course.
To list an example, however, we could think about the claim, “Wilderness is a place for humans to seek refuge from the modern world.” Implicit in this statement is a particular kind of human; i.e. someone who is able-bodied, able to afford time off to get to wilderness, and someone for whom being alone in nature would be a comfortable experience. Eddie Harris draws attention to how wilderness and rural spaces have not always been safe places for people of color, and when we were in the “wilderness-like” space of the Pioneer Cemetery near campus we noted that crime, including sexual assault, has occurred at night in the space– especially to lone women passing through the space. While the phrase, “Wilderness is a place for humans to seek refuge from the modern world” generalizes (humans=all humans), our critique of this notion is grounded in intersectionality— examining the web, or layers, of power relations that undergird the way we live in our world.