Assessment 2 - Critical Essay
Apply the course's theory to one fridge-related phenomenon — and then tell me what the course gets wrong about it
Due
30 Apr
17:00 Fri, wk 9
Weight
30%
of the course
The brief#
Pick one fridge-related phenomenon. Explain it, using the course, and then tell me what the course gets wrong about it.
Draws chiefly on Module 3 — The tyranny of time (weeks 7–9), where the argument stops being interpretive and becomes measurable. The essay is marked accordingly: on evidence and method as much as on reading.
A phenomenon is smaller than a topic. “Food waste” is a topic and will produce a weak essay. “Why my flatmates and I each independently bought yoghurt on the same Tuesday” is a phenomenon. So is a single advertisement from the week 2 workshop, one date label from Label Forensics, a single line item from your waste audit, one household rule, or one of the drawings from week 9.
Date labelling is the most popular choice and therefore the hardest to say anything new about. Choose it if you have an angle, not because it is nearest.
What makes this essay work#
Method discipline is assessed. Waste figures vary enormously with how they were collected, and a global percentage quoted without its method is not evidence — it is a rhetorical move. If you cite a number, say who measured it, how, and on whom. This earns more marks here than theoretical fluency does. The same applies to your own data: the week 8 audit is good evidence precisely because you know its method, including where it is weak.
Disagreement is welcome and is worth marks. The course argues that the refrigerator’s promise of suspended time is real but irrelevant, and that the waste it produces is its ordinary operation rather than its misuse. There are serious objections: the medical and vaccine cold chain, reduced foodborne illness, improved year-round nutrition, and the charge that blaming an appliance for consumer capitalism is a category error. An essay that presses one of those well will mark above an essay that agrees with the lectures fluently.
What will not do well is an essay with no position, or one that surveys three views and declines to hold one. The course’s own anti-neutrality applies to your writing too.
What you submit#
A PDF, 2000–2500 words.
Your own tutorial material — the blind-tasting descriptions, the annotated advertisements, the food-mileage traces, the power map, the honest labels, the waste audit, the psychological maps — is legitimate primary evidence and is usually the strongest thing in a submission. If you use another student’s material, you need their agreement and you anonymise them.
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 17:00 Friday 30 April, as a PDF
- 2000–2500 words
- every quantitative claim states how it was measured
- it takes a position, including against this course if that is where the argument goes
How it is marked
| Criterion | Weight | High Distinction | Distinction | Credit | Pass |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Argument | 40% | An argument that identifies where the course's account of this phenomenon breaks down, presses a real objection to it, and survives that objection by the end rather than only naming it. | A specific position that presses on a genuine limit of the course's account rather than only applying it, with that pressure stated early enough to organise the essay. | A specific position, stated early and defended for the length of the essay, though it stays within the course's own account rather than testing it. | A position is stated but arrives late or stays close to the brief — asserted rather than argued, or so close to what a lecture already says that dropping the phenomenon would leave the same paragraph. |
| Evidence and method | 35% | Evidence is used to genuinely test the argument rather than illustrate it, including a moment where the writer's own material complicates the position instead of confirming it. | Evidence, including at least one piece of the writer's own primary material, is specific enough that its method's weaknesses are visible and acknowledged rather than glossed over. | Every claim states its method well enough to know who measured it and how, but the evidence mostly illustrates a point already made rather than testing it. | Figures or examples are used, but at least one quantitative claim states no method, or states one the reader cannot judge. |
| Engagement with theory | 25% | A framework is extended, combined with another, or pushed against a case it does not obviously fit, doing analytical work the lectures had not already done. | A framework is used to reclassify or reinterpret the phenomenon in a way that is not obvious from the framework's usual examples. | A framework is applied to the specific phenomenon, though the application mostly restates the framework in the phenomenon's terms. | Douglas, Goffman or another course framework is named and correctly defined, but not applied to the phenomenon chosen. |
Markers read the essay once for the position, then again for whether each quantitative claim states its method. A figure cited without a method is marked as rhetoric, not evidence, regardless of how well the surrounding paragraph reads.
'Argument' and 'evidence and method' pull in the same direction only when the position is stated early and the numbers are what defend it, not what decorate it. An essay that agrees fluently with the lectures and surveys three views without holding one caps out on 'argument' no matter how sound its method is elsewhere; one that presses a real objection to the course's own claims, well-evidenced, can outscore an essay that only restates them.