教學大綱 Syllabus

Written reflections (20%)

Final Project (25%)

Role plays (15%)

In-class Participation and Attendance (40%)

No tests or exams.

On the Use of AI 

-Dear students, I am quite clear about the chatGPT and AI expectations in the course. I also know that for students AI can be a burden, not just a help, because you lose the freedom to think on your own. For this reason, I try to design assignments that evade the use of AI, so that you can feel free to pursue your creativity without burdens. 

-I choose readings where there is very little information for AI to compile. For instance, I assign transcripts of parole hearings, which are obscure and particular, full of transcription errors. These document the rawness of an encounter between an individual and the state. These are rarely taught at universities because they are considered lower-level administrative hearings. Students have even told me that they looked up materials on these parole hearing transcripts on chatGPT and "found nothing," which made me smile. Then I ask students: Why do you think that is? And the answer is fascinating, too: there's a meta lesson here about the absence of a body of knowledge about incarcerated people applying for parole; these forms of knowledge are considered worthless in comparison to the prestigious judgments of appeals courts, constitutional courts, and Supreme Courts. 

-I do allow ChatGPT in some instances and I will tell you when. In general you're allowed to first write an assignment in your native language and use AI to translate it to English. But you must 1) submit the original 2) submit your own corrections of the English (either using track changes or by hand, with a colored pen). Students are also allowed to use chatGPT to catch typos and correct grammatical errors in your work. 

-I try to design creative assignments in which AI has not yet surpassed humans. For instance, in the past I have asked students to reconstruct a migrant's journey in prose-poem form inspired by a book called PAPERS. Because it's an obscure book, there's vvery little AI can say or do. I also give students an extensive pep talk about how AI still cannot write prose-poems that blur fiction and nonfiction, capture human ambivalence and contradiction, and describe with specificity and humor the absurdity of an encounter between a person and a state. So you should feel free in writing this assignment! 

-I also frequently design projects that involve public speaking and reconstruction of a trial, so chatGPT will be useless.

-I ask students to juxtapose readings that have not necessarily been analyzed together. For instance, I might assign the first two chapters of Foucault's Discipline and Punish alongside a a recent journalistic piece about a mother whose child has been taken away by social services, and ask them how Foucault would analyze the specific details in that case. This is very hard for chat GPT to pull off, because it hasn't compiled information from recent news articles. Though chatGPT might have more generic analyses of Foucauldian approaches to child services and surveillance of mothers, it cannot analyze the specific case.