Week 1: A Short History of Public Misconduct

What this course studies, why it studies it as a discipline rather than a complaint, and the method every later week reuses.

26 July 2027

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Every public space runs on rules nobody wrote down and everybody enforces: who gets the armrest, how long a “quick chat” in a doorway is allowed to run, whether the lift waits for the person jogging toward it. This course treats those rules as a real, describable system — and studies them the way an engineer studies a bridge’s load limits: by finding out exactly how much weight it takes to make one fail.

We are not collecting complaints about rude people. We are building a method: observe the norm, isolate the smallest deliberate act that breaks it, and describe precisely what happens next. Weeks 2 through 10 apply that method to one public space each. Week 11 asks you to perform it. Week 12 asks you to write it up.

Outline#

• what “etiquette” is, described as an unwritten protocol rather than a moral fact
• the course’s method: observe, isolate, describe
• how the case-study weeks are structured, and what the Drop-in Sessions are for
• what “weaponised” means here, and what it explicitly does not mean