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GSS 202 Fall 2022

Course Info & Policies

Required Course Materials

All course materials that you need to purchase are available via the UM bookstore or the links below. You can order your course materials from the bookstore and have them shipped to you.

  • Need to purchase: Jordy Rosenberg, Confessions of the Fox, One World (2018), ISBN-10: 039959227X, ISBN-13: 978-0399592270
  • Need to purchase: James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room (1956), Vintage Books, 2013 edition, ISBN-10: 0345806565, ISBN-13: 978-0345806567
    • Available via the UM bookstore, Amazon or from a local bookseller using Indiebound
  • Do not need to purchase: Marlon Riggs, dir., Tongues Untied (1989)
    • Available streaming via UM library (https://fod-infobase-com.access.library.miami.edu/p_ViewVideo.aspx?xtid=57872)
  • Do not need to purchase: Cheryl Dunye, dir., The Watermelon Woman (1996)
    • Available streaming via UM library (https://miami.kanopy.com/video/watermelon-woman)
  • Do not need to purchase: Jim Hubbard, dir., United in Anger: A History of ACT UP (2012)
    • Available streaming via UM library (https://miami.kanopy.com/video/united-anger-history-act-0)
  • All other course readings are available via our course website and Google drive folder.

Masks

You are not required to wear a mask during class, but the university encourages it. UM’s guidance on masking right now reads like this: “Because Miami-Dade County is currently experiencing a high level of community risk for COVID-19, the University encourages masking indoors, including classrooms, especially for individuals with underlying medical conditions. CDC guidelines on masks can be found here, along with information on how to obtain free masks.”

Grading

This class will be assessed using contract grading (described below). In addition to regular preparation for, attendance of, and participation in class meetings, the work of the course will be conducted across the below 3 assignments, which are described in more detail on this website:

  • Reading responses
  • Keyword analyses
  • Final project: Curating your queer archive

There are only 2 grades for any assignment: “Satisfactory” or “Unsatisfactory.” “Satisfactory” is full credit. “Unsatisfactory” (incomplete, poor quality, or not submitted) is no credit. You must receive a grade of “Satisfactory” in order for an assignment to count toward your contracted grade. You can revise any assignment until you receive a “Satisfactory” grade.

Grade Contracts

You will determine the grade you will receive in this course by fulfilling a contract you will turn in on Friday, September 2. Your written contract will detail the requirements you will meet in order to receive the grade for which you’ve contracted and any adjustments you already know you would like to make to assignment deadlines.

Why Contract Grading?

One of the main reasons we are using contract grading in this class is to alleviate some of the anxiety surrounding grades (both yours and mine!). In this system, you will determine what grade you will receive by completing the requirements for the grade you want to receive. This allows you to determine your own goals for the course, and it emphasizes learning over grading. Simply put, I don’t think that me assigning you a grade is a good way to measure your learning or achievement. To quote Cathy Davidson, a professor at CUNY who has written about contract grading and practiced it in her own courses for years:

“The advantage of contract grading is that you, the student, decide how much work you wish to do this semester; if you complete that work on time and satisfactorily, you will receive the grade for which you contracted. This means planning ahead, thinking about all of your obligations and responsibilities this semester and also determining what grade you want or need in this course. The advantage of contract grading to the professor is no whining, no special pleading, on the student’s part. If you complete the work you contracted for, you get the grade. Done. I respect the student who only needs a C, who has other obligations that preclude doing all of the requirements to earn an A in the course, and who contracts for the C and carries out the contract perfectly.”

It will take some work to earn an “A” in this course. But if you are willing to complete that work, you will receive an “A.”

Contract Details

To fulfill any grade contract, you must do the following, which should nonetheless be specified in the contract you submit to me on September 2. When writing your self-assessment at the end of the semester, you should describe how you have met these requirements (especially number 1) in addition to the grade-specific requirements:

  1. Come to class having completed and prepared to discuss any assigned readings, films, or other media. Participate actively in class activities and discussions, making observations and asking questions that help the class think together.
  2. Complete the first keyword analysis paper and reading response 9 (these are required for everyone).
  3. Revise contractual assignments as necessary until both you and I consider them “Satisfactory.”
  4. Complete a contract reassessment and a final self-assessment.

“A” Contract

To contract for an “A” in this course, you agree to:

  1. Attend class extremely consistently (missing no more than 3 or so classes, barring illness or emergencies, is a good goal).
  2. Complete at least 7 “Satisfactory” reading responses over the course of the semester, including response 9 (required for everyone).
  3. Complete two “Satisfactory” keyword analyses.
  4. Complete a “Satisfactory” final project.

“B” Contract

To contract for an “B” in this course, you agree to:

  1. Attend class consistently (missing no more than 4 or so classes, barring illness or emergencies, is a good goal).
  2. Complete at least 6 “Satisfactory” reading responses over the course of the semester, including response 9 (required for everyone).
  3. Complete one “Satisfactory” keyword analysis (you must complete the first keyword analysis paper).
  4. Complete a “Satisfactory” final project.

“C” Contract

To contract for an “C” in this course, you agree to:

  1. Attend class consistently (missing no more than 5 or so classes, barring illness or emergencies, is a good goal).
  2. Complete at least 4 “Satisfactory” reading responses over the course of the semester, including response 9 (required for everyone).
  3. Complete one “Satisfactory” keyword analysis (you must complete the first keyword analysis paper).
  4. Complete a “Satisfactory” final project.

“D” and “F” Grades

You can earn a “D” or “F” grade if you fail to meet your contractual obligations in a systematic way. A “D” grade denotes some minimal fulfilling of the contract. An “F” is absence of enough “Satisfactory” work to warrant passing of the course.

What About Exceptional (or Mediocre) Work?

You can increase your grade by completing exceptional work. If you contract for a “B,” for instance, and submit particularly strong pieces to fulfill that contract, you will earn a “B+.”

Likewise, if you consistently submit mediocre work in fulfillment of your contract, I can adjust your grade one half-step down (e.g. from “A” to “A-”) or even, in extreme cases, a full step (from “A” to “B”), to reflect this.

Contract Reassessment

Once during the semester, you will evaluate your work so far and compare it against what you agreed in your grade contract. In this moment you can also take the opportunity to request an adjustment to your contract in either direction. If you find that you will be unable to meet the obligations of your contract, you may decide to move to the next lowest grade and its requirements. On the other hand, if you find that you’ve been performing above the obligations of your contract, you may decide to fulfill the requirements for the next higher grade. You can also use this moment to suggest alternative ways of fulfilling your contracted grade. Your contract reassessment will also provide both you and me with the opportunity to make sure that we are each keeping track of the course work you have completed so far accurately.

In order to effectively evaluate your own progress, you must keep track of your work, including days missed and assignments completed. You can keep track of your work using whatever method makes sense to you.

Late Work

All assignments should be submitted on the due date and in the format indicated in the assignment sheet (or on the due date you contracted for if you requested adjustments). Due dates are important because they allow me to organize the work of responding to your assignments in ways that best contribute to your learning. However, life also sometimes gets in the way. If you find that you need an extension on a particular assignment, even if you haven’t contracted for an extension for that assignment, please contact me as soon as possible to arrange an alternative due date.

On a personal level, like everyone else, I dislike being lied to. I am not here to judge you, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with asking for more time to complete an assignment. I would much rather that you take a few extra days to complete an assignment to the best of your ability than you turn in something thrown together because you did not have the time you needed to devote to it. But I do ask that you communicate this with me so that I can better organize my work of reading and responding to your assignments (i.e., grading is a significant amount of work and when you turn in assignments after their deadlines, I need to reconfigure my working schedule to accommodate this). You do not need to concoct elaborate stories if requesting an extension on an assignment, or even offer any explanation for this request at all. You can just ask for more time and we will work it out.

Participation

I do not explicitly grade participation in this course (i.e. “participation = 20% of final grade”), but I will take account of your reading and course engagement through our class discussions and related activities. As a reminder, all grading contracts in this class require you to:

Come to class having completed and prepared to discuss any assigned readings, films, or other media. Participate actively in class activities and discussions, making observations and asking questions that help the class think together.

There are many ways to participate in class. Just a few of them are:

  1. Raising ideas from our assigned materials for class discussion, including directing our attention to specific moments you found evocative, inspiring, unexpected, or otherwise salient;
  2. Asking questions about materials or ideas or passages you found puzzling or difficult (I cannot overstate how valuable good questions are to a thriving class, and how desperately I wish more students were courageous in asking them);
  3. Bringing pertinent materials discovered outside of class to our attention during discussion;
  4. Assisting classmates in group activities or other in-class work;
  5. Visiting office hours to extend course conversations around subjects or questions you find particularly interesting.

In addition to the above, participating actively in class means giving the class your full attention while it is happening and setting aside distractions, especially online distractions. This is a way of showing respect for others. It also means listening to everyone, acknowledging and interacting with the ideas of others, and speaking to others with respect and dignity. It means refraining from interfering with or dominating class conversation.

Attendance

Please bring the texts assigned for class each day to each class session. If we’re reading online articles, you should either bring a device on which to read them or print them and bring a hard copy.

I will track attendance every day so that I can help you keep up with the class and stay on track, but there are no set attendance requirements for this class. You should aim to stick to the attendance goal you outlined in your grade contract at the beginning of the semester, and if you miss a class here or there, you need not provide an explanation. Beyond this, if you find yourself in extraordinary circumstances that will impact your attendance, please talk to me (e.g., if you are on a university athletics team, if you or someone you are caring for has an extended illness, if there is an emergency, etc.). Barring illness or emergency, it will be difficult to pass this class – let alone to earn an “A” or a “B” – without consistent attendance.

Important note in case it needs to be said: I do not want you to come to class if you feel sick, if you are experiencing even mild cold- or flu-like symptoms, if you have been in close contact with someone who tests positive for COVID-19, or if you test positive for COVID-19. Just stay home, take care of yourself, and do not run the risk of infecting others. If you find that you are ill or will have to quarantine for an extended period (i.e., more than 1-2 classes), please talk to me. Your grade will not be negatively affected due to illness or quarantine.

You will be able to review recordings of class sessions you miss. While watching recordings of classes is not a substitute for attending class – and I don’t imagine watching the recordings will provide you with a great experience of class – it will allow you to access any mini-lectures I give during class and provide you with some indication of the material we covered in class. This class has not been designed as a hybrid class, so you should not plan to attend class virtually using Zoom.

Course Digital Infrastructure

We will make use of multiple online systems and programs in this course: a course site, Google drive, Zoom, and Blackboard. The “GSS 202 F22 Digital Infrastructure” doc in our shared class folder on Gdrive will contain the passwords and other information you need to use our course digital systems.

Course site:

We will use our course site to manage course information and our schedule. You will find an online version of our course calendar there (including the most up-to-date version of reading assignments and due dates), as well as a copy of our course syllabus. You will also find all course assignment sheets there.

Google drive:

We will have a class Google drive folder, and at the beginning of the semester I will share you into this folder. We will use this folder to store slides and other materials from our class sessions. We will also use the class Google drive folder to distribute course readings. To protect your privacy, you will need to sign in to Google drive using your UM CaneID and password, and to use this account when working on materials related to this class. You will be shared into our class Gdrive folder via your UM email address.

To access our class Google drive folder:

  1. Go to drive.google.com and log in using your UM email address (the one given to you by UMIT, with the numbers in it, NOT an aliased email). If you are signed into Google drive via another account, you will need to sign out or select “add another account” by clicking on your account icon in the upper right corner of the screen.
  2. Entering your UM email address will redirect you to the UM single sign on page, where you will enter your CaneID and password.
  3. You will now be signed into Gdrive with your UM credentials. You will know you are signed in with your UM credentials because the U logo will appear in the upper right corner of your screen. If you do not see this logo, you are not signed in with your UM credentials. Signing in with your UM credentials is important because it protects your academic work behind UM’s firewall and ensures your privacy.
  4. Click on “Shared with me” in the left-hand menu, where you should see our class folder: “GSS 202 F22.”

Blackboard:

You will submit your assignments via Blackboard. I will also use Grade Center to keep track of the assignments you have completed. You will also be able to access recordings of class sessions and chats via Blackboard.

Zoom:

I can meet with you either in person or on Zoom. If we meet on Zoom, we will utilize a set office hours Zoom link for our meeting. You can find this link via our course Blackboard site.

To meet with me on Zoom:

  1. From our Blackboard site, click on “Zoom Meeting Info” in the left menu.
  2. This will take you to a page where you will see a link for our class Zoom sessions and a link for office hours Zoom sessions. To join the office hours Zoom, click the link displayed under “Professor Thomas Fall 2022 Office Hours Zoom Info” (next to “Join Zoom Meeting”). This is the Zoom link we will use throughout the semester for one-on-one meetings.
  3. These meetings will not be recorded. I have also enabled a waiting room for office hours, which you will enter first when signing on. I will then let you into the office hours Zoom room. If I do not let you in right away, this means I am meeting with another student.

Our course will be taught in person, but I will record class sessions using Zoom. Here is how you can access recordings of class sessions (via Blackboard):

  1. Select “Zoom Meeting Info” from the left-hand menu on our Blackboard site.
  2. This will take you to a page where you will see a link for office hours Zoom sessions and for our class Zoom sessions. To join the class Zoom, click “Access Class Zoom Recordings”.
  3. You will be taken to a screen with information about our class Zoom meeting. Select “Cloud Recordings”. There, you will see a list of all of the class session recordings from the past 120 days. This is also how you access the class chat from each session. A class session recording is automatically deleted after 120 days.

Discussion Guidelines: On trust, on difficulty and on being wrong

Class discussion is a process of creating knowledge together. This is not a lecture course, and the success of this class does not depend on me delivering information to you as you sit there passively. Rather, it depends on your continual engagement and participation in a collective project of knowledge making. This is why your participation in class is so vital. This is hard work, and it only works if we all commit to respecting each member of this class through our words and our actions. This doesn’t mean that you agree with everyone else, or with me, or with the author of the piece we are reading. It does mean that we all commit to supporting and trusting one another.

The things we read in this class will sometimes be difficult or boring or unfamiliar. It’s ok to not understand them when you first read them! It’s ok that you’ve never taken a class like this before, and/or that you feel frustrated by the reading. Figuring difficult things out together as a group is what class discussion is for. We will all be entering into uncharted territory in this class, and some of the ideas we discuss may confuse you, or make you uncomfortable and angry, or both. We will all experience moments of panic, of flailing, and of error. I ask that you accept this chance to make mistakes, and that you extend this acceptance to your classmates as well.

As you know, class sessions will be recorded for viewing by those who need to miss class for extended periods of time. You will break our collective trust if you share recordings of class conversations with people outside of this class, or on public forums. Doing so will result in a failing grade in this class. Do not do this.

Language and Power

This class takes seriously the need to examine rather than censor or look away from the messiness, complexity, and, often, ugliness of history and the present. At the same time, our classroom is a contingent community and I treat it as such: we must be accountable to and respectful of each other as we collectively create a space for discussing difficult, and at times uncomfortable, issues.

In that spirit, I want to make explicit that some of the texts we will study this semester use the n-word and other racial slurs. We will not repeat these words aloud in class. While these words have a complex history of reclamation and resignification (like the word “queer”), they are not appropriate for casual classroom use.

Reading Expectations for This Class

The reading in this class will require your time and attention. One of the most common comments I receive on my teaching evaluations at the end of every semester is that I assign “a lot” of reading. When readings are more difficult to read or understand, I assign fewer pages. When we read novels, I assign more pages. This means that your reading load will sometimes be uneven from class to class. For this reason, I recommend you start the reading early and stay up to date with the reading assigned for each class.

A few tips for staying on top of the reading: (1) Read every day. Make some leisure time for this, and don’t try to cram all the pages into the night or morning before class. (2) Read at odd hours. Read between classes. Read before you fall asleep. Read instead of endlessly scrolling your social media of choice. (3) Read ahead. If you ever find yourself with some extra prep time, do your future self a favor.

Email

All students are required to check their UM email accounts regularly. I will send course information and announcements through email. I endeavor to respond to all emails that you send me within 24 hours during the week and within 48 hours over the weekend, but please do not send me urgent emails regarding your assignments in the day or hours before they are due and expect a reply.

If you have more involved questions about course material, assignments, or policies, the best thing to do is to talk to me individually. In fact, the best thing to do in almost any situation that affects your class work is simply to talk to me about it. I am happy to answer questions about the course via email, but I will recommend that more involved questions and conversations be handled via a meeting with me. I am also happy to read and discuss advance drafts of your assignments with you in a one-on-one meeting, but I will not read and comment on drafts of assignments via email before they are due.

Technological Failures Are Not Emergencies

Technological failures and mishaps – file corruption, computer crashes, wifi connection problems, uploading the wrong file to Blackboard – are predictable facts of twenty-first century life. They happen all of the time and are thus NOT emergencies. For this course, for all of your courses, for your career, for the rest of your life on this earth, you need to develop strategies that take such failures into account. Start your work early, save it often, and save it to an external hard drive or in the cloud using services like Dropbox and Google drive. Technological failure or mishap – including uploading the wrong file to Blackboard – is not an excuse for late or unfinished work.

Please note that I will grade whatever you upload to Blackboard for grading. It is your responsibility to turn in the correct version of your assignment for grading.

Plagiarism

I take the principle of academic integrity seriously and treat violations, especially plagiarism, gravely. In terms of this course, academic integrity means that when you are responsible for a task, you – and no one else – will perform that task. When you rely on someone else’s work in performing an aspect of that work, you will give full credit in the proper, accepted form. Turning in work for this class that you have not done yourself or that you have previously completed for other courses is a violation of academic integrity. The University of Miami’s honor code can be found here. Ignorance of what constitutes academic dishonesty is not an acceptable excuse for academic dishonesty.

Violations of academic integrity constitute grounds for failure of the course and possible expulsion from the university. If you have questions about what constitutes plagiarism, please contact me.

Writing and Tutoring Resources

The Writing Center offers free, one-on-one assistance with any aspect of the writing process. I strongly suggest you take advantage of this resource. You can schedule a consultation via their website.

The Camner Center for Academic Resources also offers free tutoring for UM students. You can learn more and schedule an appointment here.

Counseling Resources

UM offers counseling free of charge to students who have paid the Health and Counseling Center fee. The Counseling Center website is https://counseling.studentaffairs.miami.edu/index.html, and you can make an appointment by following the steps outlined here.

Resources for Students with Disabilities

It is important to me that you can access this course and its materials and complete its assignments. If you anticipate or experience barriers to actively participating in or completing your work in this class due to your disability, please let me know so that we can discuss options. You may also wish to contact the Office of Disability Services.