Strange Projects

In this podcast Marybeth Allinson, Geoffrey Wright, and Carlos Merino recap the strange communities class projects unveiled this week. The groups adopted creative, historical, or ethnographic projects examining ...

• Spiritual Space: Inspired by Into Great Silence, document spacetime settings here at UCA or in Conway with the potential for nurturing contemplation and religious experience. Investigate both settings specifically designed to foster spirituality and those that are unexpected or hidden from casual view. Create a film or other multimedia presentation that has the possibility of creating an atmosphere of spiritual awareness through its presentation of these settings.
• Communities of Resistance: Through participation, interviews, observation, and documentary research, examine a group on campus or in Conway that has formed to resist what it sees as the overriding practices or values of its surroundings. Explain the dimensions of resistance, capitulation, boundary formation, mutual support, and outreach present in the group you chose.
• Mission Creep: Take a look at a group on campus or in Conway that has been around for at least a few years. Through interviews, observation, and documentary research, investigate its understanding of its mission over its lifespan. What did the group start out hoping to do, and has that mission changed over the years? What were the factors that led to stasis or change in the mission? How closely connected to its mission have the group's activities been over the years? If there has been a lack of explicit mission in the group at any period, can you deduct the mission from its actual practice or rhetoric? How has success been defined, measured, and psychologically communicated to internal and external audiences in the group's history?