Critical Fabrication Project

Assignment Overview

• Students can work individually or in small groups (with expectations of scope adjusted accordingly)
• Students create a “research-creation” project that combines creative and intellectual engagement with a course topic
• Proposal due TBD, Final Project due December 8

Assignment Details

In his article, “Making Mary Ann Waters is a Free Black Woman: Critical Fabrication as Bibliographic Method,” Kadin Henningsen describes critical fabrication as a process of “research-creation” that “mix[es] creativity, intellectual engagement” and

engages with the gaps, fissures, and erasures of the archive while also helping the creator better understand the materiality of such archives through a critical process of making

We will discuss possibilities for these projects together, but you will have significant latitude to determine its substrate, platform, interface, and format. Your project should engage with a theme, medium, text, or topic from our course, but can extend its inquiry in new directions. Your project must engage with scholarly secondary literature—though precisely how it does this may be distinct from a typical seminar paper. Depending on your project’s structure, you may need to include a brief scholarly write-up outlining the questions and interventions of your project.