500-750 words. Students will work on a music video by a Latinx/Latin American artist of their choosing; if you need help with finding an artist, please contact the TA.
Student will critically analyze a music video of their choosing and respond to the following prompting questions in a well-written and structured essay. What modes of social organization are performed in the video? How is the production of race and gender in las Américas constructed, and how does this music video teach us about that? What creative and formal techniques are implemented, and how does thinking about such techniques inform your understanding of the way the music video operates? The assignment must include at least 150 words of description/close listening as part of the analysis. Please cite 3 readings, including Maria Elena Cepeda’s chapter from this week.
A successful assignment will:
Be written in clear, academic language and formatted correctly.Essays should be elegant, convincing, and intellectually refined.
paragraphs should be structured and organized; be mindful of how many paragraphs you actually need.
Engage thoughtfully with course material, going past authors’ quotes to develop ideas further.It is already expected that you know the readings and other course materials; do not provide a summary of them.
Describe social organization and the construction of race and sex in the Américas with nuance, complexity, and detail.Essays should avoid generalities and reductive assessments of social organization (i.e. empowerment discourses).
Relate discourses of race and sex to technical elements of a music video.
Describe in detail specific aesthetic techniques utilized by artists. (this aspect is paramount to a successful essay)
All assignments should appropriately follow Chicago Manual of Style 17 in-text (author-date) citation guidelines. You can access the CMOS online through the UCSD library website (you will need your VPN for full access). I highly suggest consulting the manual when working on assignments.
AI/Chat GPT Policy (from Olivia Stowell)
The use of ChatGPT or any other AI platform or tool to generate either ideas or written content (not including spelling and grammar check), or to produce any other material is prohibited in this course. Assignments found to use AI will be marked the same as if they were not turned in; there are no exceptions.
The policy is for the following reasons:
The class is designed to improve your writing skills; if you’re not writing, you’re not improving.
Using AI opens up academic honesty issues, both because it raises the question of whether the work is “your” work, and also because tools like ChatGPT rely on taking uncredited material from scholars and writers.
Using AI does not produce reliable accurate results. Similarly, there is no content or material you will ever need to have access
to other than what is outlined in the syllabus.
ChatGPT and other AI sources have serious negative environmental impacts, particularly in relation to water usage.
OpenAI has and continues to exploit workers from the global south, especially workers in prisons and refugee camps.
Late work & Extensions
There will be no extensions granted. However, there will be no automatic penalties for late work. Turning in your work on time and learning more about how you learn will be important for your improvement over the course. By this, I mean that if you are a procrastinator (like me), I hope that over the course you develop some tools for planning your work accordingly, and I don’t want to fault you if life (which includes mental health) gets in the way. You can use your final reflection to discuss how you managed late work if that is an issue for you. And yet, you will need to communicate with your TA and myself to ensure you get feedback on time if work is turned in after the deadline.
As the instruction mentioned, you have to cite 3 readings, including Maria Elena Cepeda’s chapter from this week. I will put the reading material down below.