DANBY | BIS 490 SYLLABUS
BIS 490C
(Senior Seminar): Care
Winter 2006
Monday and Wednesday 1:
Colin Danby, University of
Washington, Bothell
Room
UW1-245 (425) 352-5285
danby@u.washington.edu
Office Hours Monday and
Wednesday 11 AM - noon and 3:30 - 4:30 PM and by appointment.
Description
A seminar is a conversation. It is a
conversation sustained over a period of time by a group of people who are all
engaged in scholarly research. It is intended to be much more egalitarian
than a typical class. This is why this seminar comes at the end of your
undergraduate career -- you now know enough, and have enough skills in critical
thinking, to participate and add to a group endeavor. This
is why seminars are relatively small. Everyone speaks, everyone presents,
everyone has responsibility for the success of the overall endeavor.
You may have been taught to regard papers as wholly individual efforts. But while your paper is still ultimately your responsibility, a seminar makes it, at least in part, a group process. A seminar is a place to try out ideas, get suggestions, and hear what others are doing. It is a way to reduce the isolation of writing a paper. We will discuss our progress on papers throughout the first seven weeks, and present our papers to each other during the last three weeks.
Our seminar's topic: Since the 1982 publication of Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice: Psychological theory and Women’s Development, the concept of “care” has found wide resonance in philosophy and social science, in particular as a way to understand the lived experience of being a woman or a man. Philosophers, political scientists, sociologists, and economists have contributed to a rich transdisciplinary literature that has enlarged our ability to comprehend the world and to think ethically about it. “Care” has also produced controversy, most interestingly in the “care-justice debate” among feminist philosophers. In our reading, therefore, we will be working our way into a conversation that has underway for over two decades among a variety of scholars, a conversation that has also had resonance for a variety of questions of policy. It is unlikely that this class will reveal a single essence, or core concept, of "care." Rather, you should look for it to open up a variety of questions about how we understand society.
I will provide a very broad overview of the care literature during our first class meeting. The best way to get into the subject is to start doing our readings, but there is an online annotated bibliography by Virginia Dudley which is a smart overview of the care literature as of about ten years ago.
Requirements
You are expected to participate actively in our
seminar meetings and in our online discussion, undertake a program of research
into a specific topic, communicate the results of that research to the seminar,
and write a substantial paper drawing on your research and seminar interactions.
Grading:
Final paper: 50%
Completing paper-related tasks on time: 5%
In-class participation: 20%
E-participation and responses: 15%
Article or chapter presentation: 5%
Presenting your own work and commenting on one other paper: 5%
Paper: I will work closely with you to help you produce a strong final paper, including individual meetings and written feedback on outlines and drafts. In general I am more interested in quality than quantity -- a tightly-argued 15-page paper is better than a rambling piece of writing twice that long. (While I do not grade on length, think of 15 pages of analytical writing as a working minimum. If you need additional descriptive writing, or writing that summarizes other work, think of that as additional to the 15 pages of your own analysis -- the paper should not consist mainly of description, or summary of the work of others. The paper should raise an issue or question related to the seminar's topic and examine it carefully. It should show a firm grasp of relevant theory, appropriate use of evidence, and a clear logic. Since you have considerable freedom in your choice of topic, I will leave detailed discussion of the papers to our individual meetings.
The librarians and I will work with you to help you locate useful readings, and you will see that I have put quite a bit of the existing literature on reserve, in both electronic and non-electronic form.
People often ask if I have any preference about what style of reference you use. I have no preference. Choose a system that you are comfortable with and stick to it. The key thing is to get used to writing down complete references, including page numbers.
Paper-related tasks: You will see on the schedule a series of five paper-related assignments with due dates. These are intended to improve communication, reduce the possibility for procrastination, and avoid a situation in which you invest time in inappropriate work.
In-class participation: Vital to our success. I can give you feedback along the way about participation assessments. You should be prepared to discuss readings when you come into class, and you need to pay close attention to presentations made by others, and be ready to join a subsequent discussion. Be sure and bring copies of readings with you to class; if possible bring previous readings along too, in case we need to refer to them.
Electronic Postings: We will have a threaded discussion of the course
readings. I will ask all participants to post, by
I will assess a grade for the totality of your e-postings and responses at the
end of the class. This does not mean that you have to post as much as the
most-prolific person in the class, or that everything you post has to be
tightly argued and essay-quality. And you are welcome, as a group, to use
the e-discussion for whatever purposes you want. My interest as an
instructor is simply that your postings include active, thoughtful, engagement with
the readings.
Article or chapter presentation: You will choose a reading on which you will lead discussion. There are three guidelines for these presentations:
Presenting your own work and commenting on one other paper: In addition to presenting their own work (for about 10 minutes), each participant will be assigned to be a "discussant" on one other person's paper, responsible for about 5 minutes of comment and reflection on it, and the encouragement of subsequent discussion. I will say more about how to do that later in the course.
The minimum passing grade in senior seminars is 2.5.
Policies
The five paper-related tasks should be turned in
on time. They will receive no credit if they are turned in late, though
they will be read. E-responses to readings, to be satisfactory, need to
be on time. Late submissions of the final paper are not a good
idea! If I have time to read them, they will be subject to my normal
late-paper policy, which is that late submissions will be penalized 15% (of the
total possible grade) up to the first week they are late; 30% thereafter, but I
make no commitment to reading late final essays. It's your responsibility
to organize your life so work gets done on time. Please do not tell me
about malfunctioning disks, printers, and so forth. There are no
exceptions to the late-work policy -- there simply is no way that I can fairly
assess the personal emergencies, job pressures, and other factors that
impinge on different people's lives, and adjust their assignments accordingly.
All assignments are due in class. The
normal and most secure means of submitting work is on paper, delivered into my
hands in the class when the assignment is due. I am also willing to
accept work in e-mailed messages or as e-mailed attachments, but you send
things this way at your own risk: I cannot take responsibility for server
errors or for any of the other things that might go wrong between your effort
to send a file and my ability to print the thing out. If you are going to
e-mail me assignments please consult these additional notes on sending things electronically.
Assignments will be considered late if they are turned in on paper, or arrive
electronically, after the end of the class period in which they are due.
There is no reason to tell me if you are
going to miss class. However if a serious illness or personal emergency
is going to affect course work over a week or more, please tell me so we can
plan how to get you back on track as quickly as possible. For a few
other points see Occasionally-Asked Questions Here
are some notes on formats for written work and a
few notes on how
I assess writing.
Our scheduled classes are times for
work. Focusing on the task at hand is important for your own learning; it
also makes you a better participant in small-group discussions and other
activities that will help others learn. It is therefore expected that you
will use class time for class work, and that you will not distract others from
class work. It is my responsibility, and prerogative, to determine what
is appropriate classroom behavior.
To request academic accommodations due to a
disability, please contact Disabled Student Services in the
You are reading a web document. It can
also be located by putting "danby" into the faculty directory
accessible via the main uwb page, or by putting "colin danby" into a
search engine like google. Changes in readings or assignments will be
made on the web version, as well as being announced in class. If you miss
classes you need to check for any modifications to assignments.
I find contact with students outside of class
extremely useful in improving what I do in the classroom, and I encourage you
to see the regular class time as only part of the service provided to you in
this course. Please feel no hesitation about contacting me outside of class,
about using the scheduled office hours, and about setting up meetings at other
times. Aside from visiting during the scheduled office hours or chatting after
class, the best way to get in touch is e-mail. I don't use voice mail.
This course includes writing, and it is
assumed that written work is your own, and that when another person’s
ideas or words are used they are fully acknowledged. This is what the UWB
catalog says:
"Plagiarism
is the use of the creations, ideas or words of someone else without formally
acknowledging the author or source through the use of quotation marks,
references, and the like. Plagiarizing is stealing someone’s work and
presenting it as one’s own work or thought. Student work in which
plagiarism occurs will ordinarily not be accepted as satisfactory by the
instructor, and may lead to disciplinary action against the student submitting
it. Any student who is uncertain whether his or her use of the work of others
constitutes plagiarism should consult the course instructor for guidance before
formally submitting the course work involved."
You must use quotation marks
and references whenever you use someone else's writing. Mere paraphrase
does not exempt you from this requirement. Here are some additional notes on plagiarism.
Texts: readings on Electronic
Reserve.
E-reserve cautions: The direct links to
e-reserve readings in the schedule below worked at the beginning of this
quarter, but I cannot promise that they will always work: the normal way to get
at e-reserves is via the library’s
course reserve page. The library commits to making e-reserves
available in a format that will print out well on the library’s
computers. You’re welcome to print them out elsewhere, but neither
I nor the library can provide technical support for other computers and
printers. In general, it’s a good idea not to wait until the last
possible moment to print readings. The e-reserve collection for
this class contains more readings than we will actually use.
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Schedule of Topics and All readings should be finished before the class for
which they are assigned.
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