A doctoral seminar on involution: the discipline of increasing effort for decreasing returns, from Geertz's rice paddies to hustle-culture LinkedIn posts — taught by a syllabus that keeps escalating.
What you will do
Each week you read one case, discuss it in the room, and write a short response.
By week 4 you will produce a documented artefact demonstrating applied analysis of your assigned instance, annotated against the rubric.
By week 8 you will conduct a rigorous auto-ethnographic audit of your own accumulating workload, using a stated methodology, submitted as a structured deliverable.
By week 12 you will design, defend, and present a scholarly intervention addressing the systemic mechanism you have identified, to a room that will ask whether it works.
Read that again: read one case, discuss it, write a response. That is what all four of those sentences describe.
Who it is for
Doctoral students who have noticed their own field getting more elaborate without getting any more decided.
More precisely: anyone who has produced a work sample, at any stage of a competitive process, that took longer to make than the process could actually reward.
Most precisely: if you have ever revised a document past the point where the revision changed anything, and can still say why you kept going, you already qualify. No prerequisite unit code will ask you that directly, so this one does.