Posted: April 22nd, 2015

This thought record, or ?journal,?

This thought record, or ?journal,?

Order Description

This thought record, or ?journal,? offers you the opportunity to record the range of insights and emotions evoked by our assigned materials and in-class activities. In particular, its purpose is to foster critical reflection on the internal logic of those materials, to cultivate synthetic thinking about the ideas we encounter in this course, and to afford you time and space to connect them to your life and vocational journey more broadly. That is, it aims to add ?branches? to and to strengthen your neural networks as you compare and contrast, agree and contest, express joy and anger and discomfort, and insert the class?s materials squarely into the context of your own lives.
I alone will evaluate these briefly at the midterm and in detail at the end of the course. I encourage you to bring any thoughts, questions, and concerns evoked by your journaling to our discussions. This is not required, however, as I will keep your journals in the strictest confidence. Yet, it is my hope that in class, too, you will feel free to express yourself openly and honestly, without fear of recrimination, an increasingly rare possibility in our digital age.

There is no ?perfect? journal or one ?right? way to structure your reflections, precisely because learning is not a linear process or ?exact science.? Rather, what I will look for is that your efforts engage in some way the four areas of Kolb?s Learning Style Inventory (concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualization, and active experimentation).

In particular, your journaling will include, on the aggregate (i.e., not every entry needs to do all), the following five dimensions :

1. The making of regular entries that show thought development overtime;

2-The recording of the materials ?main arguments along with any other assertions that you find compelling or suspect or that you wish to flag for future reflection;

3-The critical interrogation of the course?s materials.That is,youmovebeyondthereporting of arguments into comparing and/or contrasting to our other ?texts? and outline how and why agreements or disagreements emerge. You should also here be able to explain where and why you agree and/or disagree with the ?text.? This latter analysis is also related to dimension no.

4-Evidence of critical reflection on the integration of your experiences in this course into those of your life and vocation, from your daily lived realities to your more long-term aspirations and global thinking; and

5-Some elements of creative engagement ,including but not limited to varied organization and formatting of your note taking and artistic representations like poems, song lyrics, drawings, etc., along with their explanation.

and this is the reading

1-Religion as ?history? in a new ?Cold War?
2- What is religion? What is violence?
3- Practicing What You Preach: Interfaith Encounters as Neighbors
4-Neoliberalism, the Commodity Fetish, and Empathy
? Watch (in class)
5- Religion and Neoliberalism (con?t).
6- https://www.brookings.edu/~/media/press/books/2013/thethistleandthedrone/samplechapter_thistleanddrone.pdf
Ahmed, The Thistle and the Drone, chapter 1 & appendix

Ahmed, The Thistle and the Drone, chapter 4, pt. 1 (134-198)

Ahmed, The Thistle and the Drone, chapter