Week 1 Session: Seminar: Naming Your Own Involution
The opening session — find one place in your own life where effort has been rising while the result hasn't, and bring it
22 February 2027
Before the session#
Read the lecture. Come with one real instance — a habit, a hobby, a group chat, a job — where you’ve been putting in more for the same or less. Nothing invented for the occasion: Assignment 1, due in week 6, asks you to go back to whatever you name today.
In the session#
A round of one-minute pitches: the instance, since when, what you’ve tried that didn’t help. The class sorts the pitches into “involution,” “just hard,” and “actually improving” — the sorting is the exercise, not the pitching.
Afterwards#
Keep whatever instance survives the sorting. It’s the raw material for Assignment 1.
The spec
What you bring to the session. Written so a reader can tell whether it has been met without asking you.
- you can describe one real instance of your own effort rising without a matching result
- you can say, roughly, since when
- you have Geertz's definition well enough to tell involution apart from ordinary hard work
Teaching team
- Aaron Jin — Convenor, Lecturer & Tutor; 卷王 (Involution King)