This semester I am teaching my dream course. I’ve it called Writing New Jersey Cultures.
Course Description
New Jersey real, New Jersey imagined. New Jersey is thrown around in speech and popular culture, though it is seldom understood. The effort of our class is to write New Jersey as we understand it. To do this, you will conduct ethnographic research on a New Jersey Culture of your choice - most likely one that you are personally a part of. Through vast amounts of in-class work doing writing, and through the drafting, revision and research processes, you will produce original research projects. Your final drafts will be shining examples of undergraduate fieldwork. The skills you glean here will be transferable to the rest of your college experience, as well as to your careers as writers, thinkers and citizens.
Just as New Jersey is indeterminate, is undefinable, is a place of possibility and marshes and hauntings and sprawl and language and music, so too will our course be a shifting realm of potentialities. Be prepared to write by hand, try out automatic writing, explore multi-modality, and experiment ethnographically.
Welcome to Writing New Jersey Cultures*.
Camilo Jose Vergara
*Inspired by Writing American Cultures, a course by Nancy Koppelman, Chico Herbison and Sam Schrager at The Evergreen State College, 2012.
Readings
Our class will use the free, open source textbook called:
Engaging Communities: Writing Ethnographic Research by Suzanne Blum Malley and Ames Hawkins.
Find it here:
http://www.engagingcommunities.org/
I will assign readings to inspire and inform our work together. I will provide PDFs of any text assigned, via Canvas. Readings may include:
New Jersey Dreaming: Capital, Culture, and the Class of ’58 by Sherry B. Otner Lifeblood of The Parish: Men and Catholic Devotion in Williamsburg, Brooklyn by Alyssa Maldonado Estrada
The Body and the City Project: Young Black Women Making Space, Community, and Love in Newark, New Jersey by Aimee Cox
Decolonizing Ethnography: Undocumented Immigrants and New Directions in Social Science by Carolina Alonso Bejarano, Lucia López Juárez, Mirian A. Mijangos García, and Daniel M. Goldstein
Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen
The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones by Amiri Baraka
I Drum, I Sing, I Dance: An Ethnography of a West African Drum and Dance Ensemble by Marissa Silverman
Dr. Smartphones: An Ethnography of Mobile Phone Repair Shops by Nicolas Nova and Anaïs Bloch
Coming of Age in New Jersey: College and American Culture by Michael Moffatt The Destabilization of Italian-American Identity on Jersey Shore by Sara Troyani
The American Diner Waitress: An Autoethnographic Study of The Icon by Heidi Liane Hasbrouck
Gentrification Down The Shore by Mary Gatta and Molly Vollman Makris Class Action Park directed by Seth Porges and Chris Charles Scott