Assignment Details As part of your Final Project in this course, students will w

Assignment Details
As part of your Final Project in this course, students will write a project proposal and reflect on how your positionality (we’ll discuss this more in class!) informs your proposal. This assignment will be worth 10% of your final course grade and will help prepare you to write your final paper due later in the semester. Even if you plan to work in groups for your final paper, this Positionality Statement/Project Proposal is an INDIVIDUAL assignment. As such, each student will write an essay of ~1,000 words that will be due via canvas on March 21st by 1:30pm. This assignment aims to fulfill CLOs 1-4. Assignment Descriiption
A hallmark of critical approaches to environmental communication is ask how an authors identities (their positionality) inform their views on the environment. This includes careful consideration of how historical context, intersecting identities (e.g., race, gender, class, migration-status…and many others), and personal experience (e.g., privileges, oppressions) of an author influence how they define, write about, and frame environmental issues. A second pillar of critical approaches is to turn critique inward in a self-reflective manner. In this spirit, and as the first part of your Final Project, you will submit a positionality statement / project proposal in which you will reflect upon how your positionality influences your choice of Final Project topic, and how you plan to study it. As you write, please consider two key guidelines:
1) Given that we all hold complex and shifting positions, and given the limited word count for this assignment (see below), you should focus your reflection on one to two of your intersecting identities/positions.
2) As this is a very personal assignment, you will not be graded on the “correctness” of your positionality descriiptions. Rather you will be graded on your level of critical engagement with how the positions you choose to write about influence the scholarly choices you make regarding your final project.