Third-Year Experience

Jonathan Banfill

This course explores the ongoing dynamics of urban change in our city of Burlington in this applied social science research methods course. Situated in a small city grappling with issues like housing costs, gentrification, changing demographics, and inadequate infrastructure, students will unravel the intricate layers of urban life. The course focuses on themes of gentrification, spatial injustice, and the “right to the city,” encouraging students to engage with space, place, and the surrounding community. Using observational methods from Urban Studies, Geography, and Anthropology, students will embark on fieldwork projects, exploring the city through a lens that unveil and address inequalities within the built environment. From deciphering the nuances of public and private spaces to understanding city policies, students will create micro-ethnographies and other creative projects. This immersive experience not only equips you with valuable research skills but also empowers you as citizens capable of effecting tangible change, here and in the future, where academic exploration meets real-world impact, acting as a catalyst for positive transformation in our urban landscape.

Erik Shonstrom

In 1999 and 2000, conservationist Michael Fay trekked over 2,000 miles across equatorial West Africa to catalog biodiversity and environmental issues. Fay’s “megatransect” is iconic in field research, setting a new standard for how to measure, record, and assess data over wide areas. This course uses the technique of transect – a straight line through a landscape along which standardized measurements and observations can be catalogued – to introduce students to the challenges of scientific observation in the real world. While students won’t cover ground quite like Fay, they will perform multiple transects of natural areas and urban environments, recording and monitoring data along the way. They will also devise their own research transect to be performed at the end of the semester. Bring your walking shoes – we’re going to cover some ground!

Ariel Burgess

Why are dystopian stories more popular and plentiful than utopian ones? In a time when, according to Mark Fisher, it is “easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” to ask “what if?” is a radical act. In this course we will do just that. Fantastical and magical worldbuilding is often saved for the creators of sci-fi and fantasy—but it does not have to be! In this course we will practice radical imagination for real-life worldbuilding to hone creative, independent, and totally out-of-the-box thinking. Through a variety of artistic, humanistic, and scientific field research methods, we will probe environmental sociological questions surrounding how we could reinvent society to address today’s entangled socio-ecological challenges. We will get out of the classroom to collect data in “natural” areas and human-dominated landscapes to explore what we find and ask the outlandish question, “what if…?”

Weiling Deng

Eerie architectural thresholds, such as a tunnel, a hotel hallway, an empty room, a freeway, an airport, an obsolescent shopping mall, an underground city, a metro station, or even a credit card reader, are called “liminal spaces,” where it is hard to tell where one space ends and another begins. Different from “weird,” which describes an exorbitant presence that exceeds our capacity to represent it, the eerie sensation conveys the misplacement of presence and absence: something that should be present but is not and vice versa. The prevalence of this uncanny kind of space raises critical questions about global late capitalism: how cities are planned and built to fulfill capitalist needs, how time feels bent (e.g. the permanent present of consumerism), how people are shaped into homogeneous citizens of supermodernity, and how the future is haunted by unresolved pasts, in both sci-fi and realist terms. This course offers a variety of methods — including photography, sound recording, mapping, cataloging, and listening — to document the spatial and temporal manifestations of liminal spaces within the greater Burlington metropolis. It trains students to be sensitive to both the historical and ongoing spatial and demographic changes in Burlington. Students will be able to take these same research and analytical tools to observe other cities’ economic and infrastructural sustainability as well as the visual and audio production of liminal spaces in video games, films, and other media.

Weiling Deng

Eerie architectural thresholds, such as a tunnel, a hotel hallway, an empty room, a freeway, an airport, an obsolescent shopping mall, an underground city, a metro station, or even a credit card reader, are called “liminal spaces,” where it is hard to tell where one space ends and another begins. Different from “weird,” which describes an exorbitant presence that exceeds our capacity to represent it, the eerie sensation conveys the misplacement of presence and absence: something that should be present but is not and vice versa. The prevalence of this uncanny kind of space raises critical questions about global late capitalism: how cities are planned and built to fulfill capitalist needs, how time feels bent (e.g. the permanent present of consumerism), how people are shaped into homogeneous citizens of supermodernity, and how the future is haunted by unresolved pasts, in both sci-fi and realist terms. This course offers a variety of methods — including photography, sound recording, mapping, cataloging, and listening — to document the spatial and temporal manifestations of liminal spaces within the greater Burlington metropolis. It trains students to be sensitive to both the historical and ongoing spatial and demographic changes in Burlington. Students will be able to take these same research and analytical tools to observe other cities’ economic and infrastructural sustainability as well as the visual and audio production of liminal spaces in video games, films, and other media.

Mike Kelly

Work can simultaneously be a source of meaning, a bane on your existence and a necessary component of survival. Despite its ubiquitous place in contemporary American life, the question of what it means to be “professional” at something doesn’t get asked very often. This is especially curious at a “professionally-focused” college like ours. The purpose of this course is to illustrate how notions of professionalism are culturally-situated historical legacies that reflect a wide-swath of values (for better or for worse) that largely go unquestioned and to help you figure out how to negotiate the tension between the way you want your professional lives to be and the systems that sometimes prevent that from happening.

Kerry Noonan

Tattoos & body adornment, meal preparation & presentation, the decoration of spaces, and the crafting of objects – these all are considered folk art and/or material culture. This section will focus on how and why people make, alter, and use objects in a variety of settings, as they make meaning through objects and aesthetic choices. Students will learn the methods and techniques of ethnographic field research, including observation, interviews, and field notes, combining these techniques with some library-focused research, to understand the vernacular arts created by folks in the Burlington area.

Kerry Noonan

Yoga? Tarot cards? Meditation? Many people today say they are “spiritual but not religious,” and engage in a variety of spiritual practices. In this class, we will use ethnographic fieldwork to learn about such people in the greater Burlington area. What do such people do, and what ideas do they hold? How do these people fit into the broader landscape of American religiosity? Studying people “in the field” gives us a chance to gather information directly by interviews and observation, and analyze what we observe and learn from them, while combining this research data with prior research by scholars to gain a broader understanding. We’ll work with research methods from the social sciences, applying them to local groups and practitioners.

Erik Shonstrom

In 1999 and 2000, conservationist Michael Fay trekked over 2,000 miles across equatorial West Africa to catalog biodiversity and environmental issues. Fay’s “megatransect” is iconic in field research, setting a new standard for how to measure, record, and assess data over wide areas. This course uses the technique of transect – a straight line through a landscape along which standardized measurements and observations can be catalogued – to introduce students to the challenges of scientific observation in the real world. While students won’t cover ground quite like Fay, they will perform multiple transects of natural areas and urban environments, recording and monitoring data along the way. They will also devise their own research transect to be performed at the end of the semester. Bring your walking shoes – we’re going to cover some ground!

Valerie Esposito

What if we studied the world not only to understand what is wrong, but to imagine how it could be right? What if fieldwork wasn’t just about measuring what’s broken, but discovering what’s possible? This course introduces students to the essential tools of field-based inquiry while cultivating a practice of hopeful, solutions-oriented observation. We will venture beyond the classroom to investigate local landscapes—natural areas, working lands, and built environments—through scientific, social, and creative field methods. Students will learn how to design and conduct field observations, collect data, map ecological and human systems, and record their findings in both technical and narrative forms. Alongside building practical skills in measurement, sampling, interviewing, and journaling, students will practice “radical observation” to notice where regeneration, resilience, and innovation already exist. By semester’s end, students will develop and carry out their own place-based research project, combining rigorous field methods with imaginative thinking to answer a central question: if we got it right—here, in this place—what could it look like?

Erik Shonstrom

In 1999 and 2000, conservationist Michael Fay trekked over 2,000 miles across equatorial West Africa to catalog biodiversity and environmental issues. Fay’s “megatransect” is iconic in field research, setting a new standard for how to measure, record, and assess data over wide areas. This course uses the technique of transect – a straight line through a landscape along which standardized measurements and observations can be catalogued – to introduce students to the challenges of scientific observation in the real world. While students won’t cover ground quite like Fay, they will perform multiple transects of natural areas and urban environments, recording and monitoring data along the way. They will also devise their own research transect to be performed at the end of the semester. Bring your walking shoes – we’re going to cover some ground!

Erik Shonstrom

In 1999 and 2000, conservationist Michael Fay trekked over 2,000 miles across equatorial West Africa to catalog biodiversity and environmental issues. Fay’s “megatransect” is iconic in field research, setting a new standard for how to measure, record, and assess data over wide areas. This course uses the technique of transect – a straight line through a landscape along which standardized measurements and observations can be catalogued – to introduce students to the challenges of scientific observation in the real world. While students won’t cover ground quite like Fay, they will perform multiple transects of natural areas and urban environments, recording and monitoring data along the way. They will also devise their own research transect to be performed at the end of the semester. Bring your walking shoes – we’re going to cover some ground!

Steve Wehmeyer

Ghosts, Djinn, Spirit Possession, Sorcery, Miracles…Scholars in the Social and Behavioral sciences have—for generations—been fascinated by, and have struggled with their encounters and explorations of supernatural belief and practice in traditional cultures the world over. How do Anthropologists, Sociologists, and Ethnographers explore, explain, and negotiate these beliefs and practices associated with the other-than-ordinary? And how do they effectively and critically engage with beliefs and worldviews other than their own, while maintaining scholarly integrity? In this course, *you’ll* learn at first hand the methods of ethnographic fieldwork and field based research, while also exploring the ways scholars in a variety of disciplines have navigated these strange waters. Are you ready to take a trip to the Upside Down?

Steve Wehmeyer

We are the way we play. We can learn as much (and frequently more) from watching a community at play as we can from watching it at work. From Oktoberfest to Burning Man, Comic-Con to Coachella – festivals are striking intersections of different forms of expressive culture – times and spaces in which performance, ritual, art, food, music, social commentary, and narrative history all come together. Festivals are inherently interdisciplinary and inherently multi-media. Festival is the means by which a culture or a community tells itself (and outsiders) its own unique story. This course will introduce students to the tools and techniques of field-based ethnographic research through hands-on, participant-observation experience, as well as through the analysis and evaluation of published accounts of field studies focused on festivals that express ethnic, regional, and inter-cultural identities throughout time and around the world.

Kristin Wolf

In this section of COR 302, we will explore the layers of an ecosystem from bedrock geology to the impacts of land use policy and cultural perspectives. Using methods from the environmental and ecological sciences, we will study the rocks, soils, water, biological communities, and ecosystem functions and eventually broaden our perspective to understand the human systems (economic, political, and cultural) that shape and reflect the local landscape. The course will offer a holistic perspective on the environment from the large-scale changes of geologic time to the recent impacts of humans, as we build foundational skills in observation, conducting fieldwork, collecting data, technical writing, and learning about the natural world through first-hand experience. The course and its environmental subjects also will be complimented and contextualized through environmental documentaries in order to understand the rhetorical and narrative development of this popular visual story-telling. Join us for hands-on outdoor fieldwork, stunning visual stories, and thought-provoking class discussions as we examine, experience, and enjoy the landscape in which we live.

Amy Howe

In “Field Methods: Printmaking in the City,” the city of Burlington will transform into our canvas for the semester. You will learn how to use alternative methods of printmaking like urban screen printing, monoprinting, and eco-art as a field method to analyze local places. As part of this process, you will create mobile print kits that you can take with you to collect information about different locations. In turn, we will use that information to ask important questions about the intersection of place, power, and access. Printmaking will also be positioned as a posthuman research methodology that can be used by artists and scholars to question the boundaries between humans, nonhumans, technologies, and environments. This course combines creative practice with academic research, experimentation, and analysis. This course is designed for students who are interested in art – both making art and studying art – philosophy, history, geography, and exploring urban spaces.

Amy Howe

In “Field Methods: Printmaking in the City,” the city of Burlington will transform into our canvas for the semester. You will learn how to use alternative methods of printmaking like urban screen printing, monoprinting, and eco-art as a field method to analyze local places. As part of this process, you will create mobile print kits that you can take with you to collect information about different locations. In turn, we will use that information to ask important questions about the intersection of place, power, and access. Printmaking will also be positioned as a posthuman research methodology that can be used by artists and scholars to question the boundaries between humans, nonhumans, technologies, and environments. This course combines creative practice with academic research, experimentation, and analysis. This course is designed for students who are interested in art – both making art and studying art – philosophy, history, geography, and exploring urban spaces.