WRD 111
Spring 2013
Overview
Now that you have identified a cultural space or scene and have some experience with it yourself, you will now gain the perspective of those whom these spaces belong. You will interview willing volunteers who identify with this culture and use the audio to compose an audio essay. This essay will be 5-10 minutes. The audio essay format will require you to engage your interviewee in a dialogue about their experiences. You will need to use the audio from your interview, as well as your own narration that will serve as a guide through this cultural experience and offer some translations of your own from your experiences. In other words, you will need to offer some kind of argument for what it is that makes up the cultural identity of this person in relation to these spaces, objects, and practices. This assignment will require you to write an outline and a transcript before you submit the audio file or URL.
Guidelines
Audio is an important aspect of how meaning is made and communicated. Volume, pitch, rhythm, etc. all function in various ways to give us rich and layered understandings of discourses. In other words, sound, audio, music offer a supplemental reading of rhetorical situations. This is a matter of speaking and listening. The community that you have identified and are working to comprehend in a rhetorical sense serves as a particular network or series of networks. But to really come to a full understanding of these networks you must have those involved tell their own stories. It becomes an ethical imperative to listen carefully to those who belong to these communities.
In this assignment you will combine the ethical practice of listening by performing at least one interview with someone who is part of the community you are studying. The particular mode you appropriate for your interview should follow the methods that work the best for the situation. You can be as formal or informal as you need, as long as you can get someone to speak about themselves, their community, and how they determine or negotiate these terms.
Some guiding questions:
- Do they see themselves as part of a “community”? If so, how do they define it? If not, do they see something else going on?
- Who do they consider part of the community? What must one do to become part of it, and is there any way to leave if a need arises?
- What do the members of the community have in common? How do they differ the most?
- What are some of the biggest concerns or issues that you believe the community faces, or that the community serves to address?
Requirements
You must first decide what kinds of questions you would like to ask and how you would like the flow of the interview to go. In other words, you will first write an outline and structure for how you imagine the interview to go. Interviews are organic events; they hardly ever stick to a prescribed plan. Feel free to follow where the interview takes you. But you do need to begin with a plan. Because of the potential challenges of this interview assignment this will be a group assignment. You will all work together to complete one interview and create one podcast.
You will then need to edit your work using an audio editing program. This way you will turn the audio of your interview into a 5-10 minute audio essay that you will post to your blog as a podcast. Again, you will create this essay in a way that focuses on the audio and communicates new kinds of insights that your scene depiction did not reveal.
You will finally record your interview and you will need to transcribe the interview to submit to your blog. This way you will have a written account of your work and your interviewee’s responses. You will use this transcription later, but it is also a good exercise for you to gain a better understanding of what exactly is spoken.
Deadlines
Tuesday February 26 – Interview Outline due
Friday March 1 – Interviews done
Friday March 8 – Audio Essay Podcast Due
