Week 5 Practical: Case clinic 1: the seminar room past the bricked-over fire door

The first supervised on-campus observation — a disused Arts Annex seminar room, marked "do not reassign" on the facilities floor plan, that reads as larger on the inside than the corridor outside allows.

22 March 2027

Before the practical#

Consent form and buddy pairing from week 4 must be on file. Bring your log template, a thermometer/hygrometer pair, and a nazar amulet from the department’s fieldwork kit.

In the practical#

The case: Seminar Room 3 in the Arts Annex has sat empty since a renovation bricked over its second fire exit, and facilities flagged it “do not reassign” rather than update the floor plan. Entered alone, the room reads as extending further than that floor plan allows — a second, identical-seeming stretch of room beyond where the corridor wall should be. Nobody has produced a log of what, if anything, is at the far end of it, because nobody who has gone to look has been able to find their own way back out.

This week’s protocol is explicitly two stages, run separately and logged separately:

1. Diagnose. Before the room counts as “live” for the case log, take a thermometer and hygrometer reading just inside the door and compare it against a baseline reading taken in the corridor. The extension reads measurably cooler and drier than the corridor outside — a real, loggable instrument signal, not an impression. A reading within normal range for the building means the case isn’t live today; log that too.
2. Respond. Once the reading confirms the case is live, one observer enters while the other stays in the corridor. The rule is not optional: an occupant cannot find their own way back out, and only the observer who stayed outside, opening the door from that side, ends the observation. This is the case the buddy-system rule from week 4 was introduced for — corroboration and rescue are the same requirement here, not two separate justifications for the same paperwork.

Separately from both stages, log whether the nazar amulet clipped to the inside door handle has cracked since the last cohort’s visit. This is the corpus’s first real fieldwork test of a week-3 measure — logged honestly as a data point to compare against the instrument reading, not asserted to have done anything. A cracked nazar is not treated as confirmation, and an intact one is not treated as a clean reading; both go in the log next to whatever the thermometer says.

Afterwards#

Logs are collected into the course’s running record of the case, which every cohort adds to. Your own log, this week’s classification call, and both the diagnose/respond and nazar entries are raw material for the Field Case File due in week 6.