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Modern Urban Cultures and Identities in ‘Old’ Cities
POJECT DESCRIPTION
This project for innovations in perceiving and teaching Cultural Studies at undergraduate level emerges from the need to promote effective peers communication, currency of creative teaching and learning experiences throughout the region and support linkage between university teaching and research activities developing its cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary dimensions. Actually, it will merge at least two educational perspectives – Cultural Studies and Sociology, which it attempts to join both by common issues and strategies.
The main goal of this project will be to move away from an average ‘uniform’ vision on how Cultural Studies and Sociology should be taught, by opening new perspectives, nourishing new environment and giving lecturers an opportunity to voice their problems and concerns on these matters insensibly overcoming them.
Our joint efforts will advance through establishing a kind of university teachers’ partnership (UTP) for innovation in Sociology and Cultural Studies which aims to improve and gradually intensify university teaching and learning process and to encourage ongoing professional development in their particular fields through coming into intensive communication, joint teaching and cooperative learning.
We expect that in the long run our project will produce several teams of open minded young university teachers in Cultural Studies/Sociology, who will be ready to address in international collaboration specific teaching and learning needs of their students as well as those of their colleagues in home institutions. Our regular participants chosen on competitive basis will collegially advance their own comprehension of collaborative and service learning approaches gradually becoming the resource faculty themselves. They will be able to identify the best approaches to most problematic issues in the area, to mediate while teaching and to offer professional expertise in their home departmental curricula designing, revision and appending. We also envisage adjusting their academic sights by a range of local actual learning projects during inter-session periods in the 2nd and 3rd year of the project. So priority will be given to joint applications coming from the young academics currently teaching at the same university.
The project is envisaged to meet its specific objectives combining direct teaching and articulated self-reflections, shared experiences, peer observations with first-hand students’ reaction and feedback.
Focus and Format of Contact Sessions
The area this project is primarily concerned with is Cultural Studies. However, we do not view this area in a narrow sense of ‘kulturology’, but rather as cross-disciplinary area that includes an analysis of (post)modern cultures from the positions of such disciplines as sociology, philosophy, political science, anthropology, religious studies and others. This also means that the term ‘culture’ is used here in a wider sense. We believe that merging different disciplines will not simply help to see the phenomenon under study from different angles, but will also enrich each discipline methodologically and empirically. Moreover, bringing together sociologists, anthropologists, kulturologists and other researchers will also contribute to removing inter-disciplinary stereotypes and prejudices. This will help strengthen links between disciplines and their teaching scenarios and serve as an impetus to greater communication between academics.
We hope that envisaged intensive contact sessions will provide people with support they lack in their home institutions. These sessions intend to boost the development of cross-disciplinarity and to encourage lecturers to use other disciplines’ methodological techniques to enhance their own research and teaching. Participants will be demonstrated that teaching culture can be an extremely creative and rewarding process regardless of which discipline it is taught in. Lecturers are expected to discover new original ways of integrating ‘culture turn’ into their courses. They will learn to find unorthodox representations of cultural identities in their disciplines and to identify the significance of various aspects of culture for their specific areas of study. Project participants will be directly assisted to develop innovative teaching techniques that are appropriate for explaining the most complicated issues in contemporary cultural research.
Theme Justification
The theme for the proposed seminars reflects out intention to build upon the previous developments of the Centre for Humanities at the Lviv National University and to strengthen the emerging community of young university teachers, who are involved into two interdisciplinary MA Programmes in Sociology and Cultural Studies. The overarching idea of (post)modern urban cultures and identities in ‘old’ cities linking sociology, anthropology and cultural studies will be employed. The topics for the school were, therefore, selected to meet three crucial requirements – (1) to be of interest to the bulk of potential participants of our seminar, (2) to prove how real environment in which the teaching occurs could be problematized and incorporated into the curriculum and (3) to contribute to the ongoing reviewing of the existing curricula and improvement of the quality of teaching in social and human studies in the target region. Moreover, we aimed to make out theme appeal to a broader academic audience in the region, who will be interested to benefit from the outcomes of our seminars.
The topics chosen for our seminars are thought to be both challenging in terms of intellectual analysis and rewarding in terms of their capacity to serve as a testing ground for creative/interactive teaching methodologies. They will specifically address local historical, social and cultural contexts in the participants’ countries that allow us to avoid transforming our seminars into pure methodological forums. Instead, the seminars will have intrinsic value, which will in turn facilitate and encourage discussion on the specific teaching matters, providing incentives to test ideas and techniques in continuous collaboration with resource faculty. This will make the alloy of Sociology and Cultural Studies a successful combination.
Also, appreciating the growing interconnectedness of social sciences, we wanted to have topics for discussions sufficiently flexible to attract greater number of interested participants from different areas of teaching. We hope that interdisciplinarity of the sessions will be instrumental in strengthening the network of seminar participants and extending the effect of our seminars beyond the planned sessions.
Finally, we argue that the themes for our seminars do need some innovative methodological inputs, as they are still taught at universities across the region using conventional paradigms as well as old-fashioned methods, especially in undergraduate curricula.
Core Activities and Time Line
Project duration is 33 months starting from June 15, 2004.
We believe that educational perspectives could be revised and streamlined by:
developing university teachers’ collaborative network within the areas of academic interest;
merging efforts of project’s participants to design purposely-built learning activities;
dealing with practical issues;
tracking participants’ progress;
taking students’ feedback into account;
presenting annual university teacher award(s).
Volunteers chosen among young university faculty of the region (Ukraine, Poland, Belarus’ as well as St. Petersburg European University and Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences) become a core of the university teachers’ partnership for the next 3 years. They will explore and reshape educational perspectives in social sciences and humanities through consecution of the following programmes:
(1) UTP face-to-face program (teaching initiatives, questions and issues meetings, actual learning projects, workshops and personal consultations with the resource persons etc.) – open since the 1st year of the project for UTP members only.
(2) UTP self-development program (e-communication forums, hot topics immediate expertise, links, spotlights on students’ responses, diaries and self-reflections etc.) – open since the 2nd year of the project for UTP members and other interested parties.
UTP practical support program (for teachers seeking in-depth help through self-reflection and identification of specific areas, in which they feel they need to develop their teaching and metacognitive monitoring further) – to be open by the middle of the 2nd year of the project by UTP members for other interested academics.
The practical support program will be available to teachers in the following forms:
· One day classroom observation and idea sharing;
· One seminar videotaping;
· Short-term exchanges between schools within university teachers’ partnership.
· The UTP will match teachers, assisting them in strengthening the purposeful, innovative and effective teaching and learning in their classrooms through exchanging ideas with their fellow-lecturers. It also intends to help them to develop more research oriented patterns within their existing curricula as well as produce new courses under this interdisciplinary perspective.
All participants will take part in the 3 week-long annual contact sessions and 1-week winter workshops. Winter workshops could be split into 2 or 3 parallel meetings hosted every year by the another university (being home institution of our regular participants) so that till the end of the project each of UTP members obtain an idea on state of the art in their field in each country of UTP target region.
UTP summer contact sessions will be designed as actual teaching & learning projects in the following way:
Morning seminar on the ponderable topic within announced problem mediated by (a) invited guest professor from the list of resource faculty or, in the second part of the project, by (b) UTP participant. (2 academic hours)
Written feedback on the class (30 min)
Afternoon discussion to reflect on teaching and learning that has occurred in their classroom. Critically engaging with and commenting on what participants’ have written. Discussion mediated by (a) invited consultant from the list of resource faculty, who also visited the very seminar, or, in the second part of the project, by (b) chosen UTP participant (3 academic hours).
Outline of the Key Project Activities
Activities planned for the 1st year (June 2004 – May 2005)
call for proposal
data base elaboration (search for partners, publications monitoring, interviews, etc.)
selection of participants
summer contact session (3 weeks, provisional dates: August 9–29, 2004)
monthly seminars*
winter workshop (two parallel 1 week sessions), provisionally planned for January 24 – 31, 2005.
students’ feedback discovering
analysis of the results, correction of the strategies taking account of participants’ and students’ feedback.
*) Monthly Seminar is envisaged as participants’ important practice pattern, a kind of actual teaching sampling. It is seen taking place bi-weekly (or, what is more convenient from the mobility point of view, during 1 weekend each month) in a format of a delivered class on a specific topic fitting the frame of creative (a) class atmosphere; (b) methods of delivery; (c) collaborative learning effect. The addressed audience should be current LNU students from newly introduced within the humanities BA programs in Cultural Studies and Sociology — depending on students’ interest to the announced topic. The class will end with the half an hour students’ oral reflections. Each seminar will be videotaped for further instructor’s self-reflection and to be shown during the next contact sessions for the colleagues’ review.
Best samples could become a part of the Project’s archive.
Activities planned for the 2nd year (June 2005 – May 2006)
· Establishing the practice of short-term exchanges within UTP;
· Tracking participants’ progress;
· Summer contact session, provisionally planned for 4 – 25 July 2005 (3 weeks)
· Monthly seminars;
· Regular peer observations;
· Winter workshop (1 week)
· Collecting and processing responses from the students taught by the seminar participants;
· Gathering participants’ self-evaluation reports
· Pilot phase of UTP practical support program for non-members.
Activities planned for the 3rd year June 2006 – March 2007
· External evaluation of the project
· Summer contact session, provisionally planned for 10 – 31 July 2006 (3 weeks)
· Regular updating of the Online Resource Centre
· Setting up the project’s archive;
· Short-term exchanges within UTP;
· Monthly seminars videotaping;
· Winter workshop (3 parallel 1 week sessions)
· Distant networking;
· Review of the project’s outcomes; drafting the final report.
Below, we rationale the frame, content and outline of contact sessions for the first year.
Summer contact session
Theme 1. Places of Memory: Inside the Visible
Format: case study
seminar with group reflections
research based seminar
Going out to the city participants will carry out a brief case study on the given subject in cooperation with their team members. They will probe paradoxical relations of transparency and opaqueness of visible cultural heritage within some unfamiliar context. One of the main advantages of this approach is that mixed multicultural audience will allow to consider features of different backgrounds within the same sample. Next seminars will show how this framework scales easily when the parameters of culture are ‘unknown’ or ‘modified’.
Then paricipants will try to investigate how do subjects navigate communities – locally, regionally, nationally, globally – to form and transform identities. Widening the debate participants will turn to issues of exporting identity by visual means, picturing the title nation vs minorities etc. Incorporating of personal account of each participant would be welcome. (6 days).
Theme 2. Mapping (Post)modern Cultural Imagination
Format: media based seminar
case study
Practical pattern: constructing of visual essays
This set of lectures/seminars will investigate ‘location of culture’ and its perception. During this part we invite people to interact while preparing visual essays on collective cultural imagination figuring out such familiar mental boarders as own/stranger, feminine/masculine, infant/adult, normal/abnormal, present/future and so on. Further reflections will attempt to appropriately blend examples of readymade and creative images, examining culture as software of the mind and countering unity and coherence of grand narratives with dispersal and contradiction of disjunct cultural images.
Then partisipants will follow up imposing cultural trauma as both image and amnesia of cultural consciousness evoking the official truth of a history that is constituted by the very incomprehensibility of its occurence. Integrated disscussions will approach questions of identity, history and a nostalgic narrative from the perspective of a burgeoning field of "trauma studies". Participants will try to derive some productive meaning from the current theories of trauma as methodological frameworks. (6 days).
Theme 3. City, Networks, Mobility: Challenges for Social and Cultural Studies
Format: excursion
research based seminar
Practical pattern: constructing of media based seminars
This set of lectures/seminars will follow the ones on cultural imagination switching to urban mobility and changing identity in urban space. It will show how new trends (1) integrate conventional research methods and (2) develop new techniques. One day session will consider post-structuralism in terms of methodological innovations it brought about. Seminar participant will be asked to discuss how the teaching of these complex issues can be organized in the best possible way. Next sessions are planned as illustrations of how methodology is incorporated into a specialized course on subjects, which are new not only in Eastern Europe, but also in Western social science. Finally, a session on discourse analysis of a movie will be presented. We will ask seminar participant to discuss the strength of adoption of this visual text as a method of presenting particular ways of studying social reality. Then, they will have to think how to use movies in the sample sessions they will give later during this summer session. Among the movies we expect to offer them to consider are ‘Breaking the Waves’, ‘The Cube’, ‘Urban Legends’, “Koukoushka”, ‘Brat-2’ etc. (5 –6 days).
Winter contact session
Theme. ‘Hauntology’ and Ambiguities of European Identity
Format: research based seminar
focus group
This session will briefly but deeply examine understanding of ‘European identity’ and particularly the history and concepts of European integration of both east and west Europe; uniting of Europe by cultural politics; the contradictions of integration. A basic accent will be put on experiencing cultural transitions in recent urban culture.
The seminar will explore various kinds of relations between transition and cultures (interdependence of transition and self/group identity, everyday life, and urban subcultures). How do NIS social and cultural experiences after 1989 shape cultural identities and behaviour of individuals and sociogroups would be basically the focus of the discussion. The prevailing concept would be sociocultural conditioning of each transition.
We will also trace European culture as necessarily urban one related to various aspects of modern and postmodern urban identities. The topoi of a university in the semiosis of urban space will be opened. We also will discuss the psychogeography of a city and its concept as being a Utopian space. (5 days).
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Resource Faculty
1. Olexander Iwashyna, Kyiv Mohyla Academy (Ukraine)
2. Larissa Kirylyuk, Center of the Education Development Problems of the Belarusian State University, Minsk (Belarus’)
3. Andrzej Mencwel, Warsaw University (Poland)
4. Mica Nava, University of East London (UK)
5. Joern Ruesen, Kulturwissenschaft Institute, Essen (Germany)
6. Jutta Scherrer, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris (France)
7. Andrew Wernick, Trent University (Canada)
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