Assessment

Four pieces of work, each testing a different module — an ethnography, an essay, a design project, and showing up with your fieldwork.

Each assessment takes one module and asks you to do something with it rather than recall it. The Fridge Ethnography applies Module 2’s micropolitics to a real household; the Critical Essay works in Module 3, where the argument becomes measurable; the Counter-Fridge answers Module 4 by proposing something to build instead. Participation isn’t tied to a single module — it’s the 10% for showing up to every tutorial with the thing that week needs, Module 1 included.

Three of the four cannot be written from the library. The ethnography needs a household that consented to being observed, the essay is strongest when it rests on your own audit data, and the design project grows out of the week 10 and 11 tutorials. Fieldwork can be borrowed in a way an argument can’t, so submitting observations you did not make is treated as fabrication rather than plagiarism — see Policies. And none of the four are marked on agreeing with the course: the essay in particular rewards whoever presses the strongest objection — the vaccine cold chain, reduced foodborne illness, year-round nutrition, or the charge that blaming an appliance for consumer capitalism is a category error — over whoever agrees with the lectures fluently.