Final Project Assignment

Due: Wednesday, May 13, by midnight, to CourseWorks

Please choose one of the following options for your final project.

Cheers to love

Format: 4–6 pages, double spaced

Assignment: Offer your own encomium to Eros as an additional symposiast at Agathon’s.

  • Your speech should be informed by materials we have covered since the Symposium.
  • You may choose when it is your turn to speak during the course of the night, but you must make this explicit by starting your speech with a direct response to the previous symposiast.
  • Be sure to include a brief explanation of the backstory of your character (who are you and what’s your deal?), though these need not constitute part of the speech itself.

Love, gender, and sex in the wild

Format: 5–8 pages, double spaced

Assignment: Analyze carefully and critically one (and just one!) way in which love, gender, and/or sex shapes your own everyday life.

  • Do some intense (self-)observations for at least a week: How do you experience love, gender, and sex? How are they more or less implicitly discussed and represented as you move around the world and go about your life? How do they shape and structure the places we inhabit?
  • There’s a lot to say, so focus on just the one thing that you find the most interesting and which you think would also be most interesting to your classmates!
  • Be sure to include a critical reflection on the kind(s) of sex, gender, and love that the dating app in your view steers its users toward.
  • Be sure also to engage with concepts, ideas, and/or views from the class.

Love at the right swipe

Format: 5–8 pages, double spaced

Assignment: Analyze carefully and critically one (and just one!) way in which sex, gender, and/or love is constructed in a dating app of your choice.

  • You should actually use the app for a while. Pay special attention to the hidden logic of the app’s operation, including whether this lives up to the explicit marketing: how the app approaches gender and sexual orientation, how it designs and presents profiles, how its matching system works, etc.
  • There’s a lot to say, so focus on just the one thing that you find the most interesting and which you think would also be most interesting to your classmates!
  • Be sure to include a critical reflection on the kind(s) of sex, gender, and love that the dating app in your view steers its users toward.
  • Be sure also to engage with concepts, ideas, and/or views from the class.

Wild card

Format: Up to you, but you must discuss your idea with either me or our TA by Monday, April 27 at the latest.

Assignment: With my or our TA’s permission, you may write a third response paper or pursue another creative project (a video essay, a short story, a dialogue, a play, a game, a zine, a mini-album, a podcast episode, an exhibit, a website or an application, a reenactment, an alternative history, etc.). Usually this is an in-depth response to a reading or a philosophical problem we’ve covered, but it need not be.