Week 12: Capstone — Writing Up an Anti-Manners Report

Turning eleven weeks of case studies and one live performance into a single analytical argument, and reviewing that argument in practice questions ahead of the Final Exam.

11 October 2027

Open the slides

The course ends where academic work usually does: arguing a claim under pressure. Not a diary of what you did in the Practicum — a single analytical account of one norm, chosen from the ones this course studied, that uses your own case studies and your Practicum as evidence for a specific claim about how that norm actually works, what enforces it, and what it takes to break it visibly.

This week is a working session rather than a lecture: bringing a draft claim, testing it against the method the course opened with in Week 1, and rehearsing that argument against the kind of novel scenario the Final Exam will actually put in front of you. There’s no new topic here — just the discipline of turning eleven weeks of noticing into one argument you can defend on paper.

Outline#

• from case study to claim: what makes an argument out of a pile of observations
• using the Practicum as evidence, not anecdote
• structuring an argument so the claim, not the chronology, does the work
• your Final Exam is due this week — see the assessment page for its format and forty practice questions