Attendance at Rounds, the ethics of observing strangers, fieldwork safety, extensions, and what you may use an AI for.
Policies and support#
This course sends you into rooms full of people who have not agreed to anything. Most of what follows is about that. The rest is the ordinary machinery.
Attendance at Rounds#
There is no attendance mark for Rounds, and there is also no way to write the Field Notes without having done four of them.
If you cannot attend a Round, do it in your own time that week, at the same kind of hour, and say so in the header of that set of notes. Week 3 and week 12 are the exceptions — Cyberball and the presentations both need the room — and if you will miss either, email Noor in advance.
Monday lectures that fall on a public holiday#
Two of the twelve do, and both are ACT holidays rather than national ones, so they are easy to miss if you are new to Canberra. Week 3 is Canberra Day (the second Monday in March). Week 9 is the Anzac Day holiday — 25 April 2027 is a Sunday, so the Monday is the observed public holiday here.
Both lectures are recorded and released on the Monday morning rather than delivered live. Nothing else moves: the readings are still due before the Monday, and both Thursday Rounds run as scheduled. The teaching break after week 5 already covers Good Friday and Easter Monday, so no Round is affected.
The ethics of observing strangers#
This is the policy that matters and it is not negotiable.
Sites that are out of bounds, for the whole semester. Hospital and clinic waiting rooms. Mental health, sexual health and addiction services. Court buildings. Social security offices. Places of worship during a service. Schools. Any setting where being present identifies someone as a user of a specific service.
Never photograph people. Not for notes, not for the Place Audit, not blurred. Draw the room instead if you need its layout.
Never record anyone identifiably. No names, no usernames, no verbatim quotes of anything said in a space its speakers thought was theirs. “A man who had been there since before I arrived” is a finding; his sentence is his.
If you are asked what you are doing, tell the truth and offer to leave. You are a student on a course about public places, you are counting how people use the room, you have written nothing about anyone individually, and you will go if they would prefer. Have that sentence ready before you walk in. If saying it out loud would embarrass you, you have chosen the wrong room.
Be a customer where the place sells something. A pub, a café, a barbershop and a laundromat are businesses, and people’s livelihoods are not free fieldwork sites. Buy the thing. Tip.
Online spaces count. Observe a room you already belong to, or one whose rules permit it. A channel being technically public is not the same as its members consenting to be studied, and an archive means anything you copy stays copyable forever.
This course holds a standing low-risk ethics approval for observation in public commercial and civic space under these conditions. Working outside them is outside the approval, which is a real problem and not a paperwork one. If a site you want is not clearly permitted, ask Noor before you go, not afterwards.
Fieldwork safety#
Tell someone where you are going and when you expect to be back. Go in daylight or to places that are busy. Do not go into a room that feels wrong to you — leave, and pick somewhere else, and there is no penalty for it and no need to justify it.
Observing people can be misread, particularly if you are sitting still in a room with no obvious reason to be there. That is the main risk this course carries, and the rules above exist as much for your safety as for anyone’s privacy.
If something happens in the field — you are challenged, followed, or made uncomfortable — tell Teo or Noor. You will not be marked down for abandoning a site.
Extensions and late work#
Ask before the deadline and the answer is usually yes. Email Noor with the new date you need; you do not have to explain why for anything up to five days.
Beyond five days, or for the Proposal, we will need to talk, because the Proposal is presented to the room in week 12 and a late one loses the questions.
Work submitted late without an extension loses 5% of the available mark per working day, to a floor of 50% of the available mark, after which it is marked but capped.
If something serious is happening, the university’s process exists and is better than anything this course can offer. Use it, and tell us that you have.
Academic integrity, and AI#
The work is yours. The observations especially.
You may not generate fieldwork. Notes from a room you did not sit in are fabricated data, and inventing observations is the one failure in this course that is treated as serious misconduct rather than a bad mark. It is also easy to spot: fabricated field notes are tidy, and real ones are not.
You may use an AI as a reader, an editor, and an argument to push against. Ask it to find the weak step in your Place Audit. Ask it what a reviewer would object to. Ask it to tell you what your blind spot page is avoiding.
You may not use one to write your prose for submission. Not because of a rule about tools, but because this is a course about noticing, and the writing is where the noticing shows. A paragraph that could have been written without going to the place is a paragraph that fails regardless of who wrote it.
Declare what you used, in a line at the end. “I used an LLM to check my argument in section 3 and to tidy the references.” That costs you nothing. An undeclared one found later costs a great deal.
Getting help#
Ask Teo during a Round. Ask Noor by email for anything about ethics, sites, extensions or a place that will not let you observe it — sites refusing access is normal fieldwork and there is almost always a second option, but only if you say so early.
Access and inclusion arrangements are handled through the university’s service and are never something you need to explain to us. Send us the plan and we will apply it. If a fieldwork requirement in this course is a barrier for you, tell us and we will find a different site or a different method; the Rounds have more flexibility in them than the briefs suggest.