Time Schedule:
Judith A.N. Henchy
LIS 498
Seattle Campus
Library service and information science subject matter in seminars, workshops, or other appropriate formats. Topics vary and may be repeated for credit.
Class description
This course will serve a dual purpose of introducing advanced students to information sources in and about the region, and teach them to evaluate those sources within various theoretical articulations: scholastic, cultural and political. It will offer an analysis of the pedagogical implications of the life cycle of information, and critique these assumptions from various theoretical and cultural viewpoints.
It will look at different kinds of local knowledge, and the development of information industries in the region, including the influences of Western philosophy and pedagogy on shaping that industry under colonialism. It will look at contemporary information sources, censorship and its implications for scholarship. It will examine theories influencing the ways in which information resources from regions such as Southeast Asia are archived and described – those dominant systems influencing the classification of textual knowledge in the Euro-American scholarly world. Tracing Heidegger’s notion of “conquest of the world as picture” we will question the idea of exhibitionary order, and the role of colonial (and postcolonial) discourses in positing Southeast Asian information resources as exotic objects on display.
Student learning goals
General method of instruction
Recommended preparation
Class assignments and grading
Students will be graded on participation in class discussion (30%); short papers (1 -2 pages) discussing each week’s readings (30%) and a 40 page research paper (40%).
