Meng-Hsien (Neal) Liu
Assignments & Activities Archive
Assignment Description
As Writing Studies has sought to address multimodal and embodied composition, one area has focused on how objects mediate writing processes and identity formations (Shipka). This assignment represents a final term project for an advanced composition class with the overall objective of complicating students’ thinking regarding the interplay between writing, genre, identity, and object. This assignment, titled Object Ethnography for the Real-World, is comprised of six sections, each of which is geared towards certain subtopics and skills. These sections include abstract, introduction, annotated bibliography, (authentic) documents, one-week object ethnographic observation, and reflection. As will be illustrated further below, this semester-long object ethnography project primarily aims to engage students with composing two professional documents that are significant to their professional development (e.g., applying for a summer internship in marketing for a business-major student) (D’Agostino), undertaking an ethnographic observation task of an object in that professional development process (e.g., a marketing portfolio), and theorizing the relation between the two documents and the object. This final assignment serves to bridge students’ specific disciplinary interests within a more humanities-centered advanced composition class while still helping them hone essential academic research skills (e.g., scouting and annotating sources, writing observation memos, or composing findings) so that they can better appreciate that writing, disciplinary identity, and object are all imbricated in a complicated, long-term process of becoming (Roozen and Erickson).