Nuts and Bolts:
- 2-3 pages (no less than 2 full pages, no more than 3) double-spaced, 12 pt. font.
- Cite all sources and provide full citations. (I don’t care which citation style—just that it is consistent and complete with page numbers).
- Give your paper a title.
Assignment Parameters for Short Paper #2:
The readings for this unit, “The Dissonance of Democracy,” share themes of “listening” to concepts or approaches that are not thought to go together, in order to open critical ways of thinking that help us to imagine different possibilities and actions. Our authors put things together such as: “deliberative democracy” and “activist democracy” (Iris Marion Young) and “bodies stolen” and “bodies reclaimed” (Eli Clare), even though they do not neatly resolve. The authors find this dissonance to be productive in ways that a neat resolution often is not, and thus useful for democratic practice, or in “refiguring the world.” (Clare). They also connect the most intimate aspects of embodied experience as a key part of this work.
In this paper, please focus on a theme, event, action, or memory as described in Judith Heumann’s Being Heumann: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist that exemplifies the power of activating and listening to the “dissonance of democracy” (Bickford) in order to “refigure the world” (Clare). Develop your analysis through one or more of these analytic frameworks: Young (deliberative/activist democracy) or Clare (stolen bodes, reclaimed bodies). Feel free to incorporate other readings or films from Weeks 7 and 8 if you wish.
Beginning (1 or 2 paragraphs):
- Introduce the theme, event, action, or memory in Being Heumann that you will analyze as “dissonance of democracy.” Identify the dissonance within that example. Your example may be drawn from the intimate, personal, embodied level; the socio-political level; or both as interconnected.
- Introduce the framework from Young and/or Clare that allows you to ground your analysis of dissonance of democracy. How does that framework use things that might be seen as opposites, or conflicting, as sites of critical thinking and changing the world? How will you use that framework to develop your analysis of Being Heumann?
- Clearly state your argument about how “dissonance” allows for the critical work of democracy in the section of Being Heumann that you are writing about.
Middle: (at least 2 paragraphs)
- Develop your analysis through a close reading the pertinent passages of Being Heumann, using your analytic framework (Young and/or Clare).
End: (at least 1 paragraph)
- Conclude with implications for the present. What is to be learned about “refiguring the world” through activating and listening to the dissonance of democracy from the critical thinking that you have been doing while writing this essay?
