The Peace Conference
The capstone — run the semester's own credentials-and-overclaiming audit against a mycorrhizal phenomenon of your choosing, in writing, alone.
Marc-André Selosse · CC0 · Wikimedia Commons
Return 12
Weight 60%- Due
- 17 May 2027
- Weight
- 60%
The brief#
Choose one mycorrhizal phenomenon — from this course or from your own reading — give it a diplomatic label of your own, and then put that label on trial using the standard this course built in week 1.
This is not a survey of the semester. It is one phenomenon, argued in depth: what the biology actually shows, what your chosen diplomatic term adds to that description, and — the part that is actually marked most heavily — where the term stops describing and starts inventing. Use the week 1 credentials test and the audit format from week 12’s Briefing as your method, not as decoration.
What you submit#
A written piece of 2000–2500 words, or an equivalent artefact (a short recorded briefing, a designed dossier) if you have discussed the substitution with the convenor beforehand. Either way, a marker must be able to follow your argument without you in the room.
The marking: block above renders as a holistic statement rather than a
weighted table — this is the one assessment in the course judged as a whole
rather than by separately-scored parts, which matches how a real diplomatic
audit is actually read.
The spec
The brief poses the problem and leaves room for a response. The spec is the fixed part: what a marker checks. Some lines can be checked mechanically; the rest call for judgement.
- submitted by the deadline, in the format named below
- names a real, citable mycorrhizal phenomenon and a diplomatic label for it
- explicitly states where the label sharpens the biology and where it overclaims, using the week 1 credentials test as the standard
How it is marked
The Peace Conference is judged as a whole against the brief, with particular weight on whether the biology is accurately represented, whether the diplomatic framing is defended rather than merely repeated, and whether the self-critique is genuine rather than a token closing paragraph.