I am intrigued by the idea of teaching some more advanced and “scholarly” ideas to my LIB200. Today I am interested Karen’s idea of “the fetish.” I would need to bring my students up to speed on the concept using something short of Freud’s original work, but not so simple that they don’t learn anything about how scholarship adds to the depth and understanding of the world.
Next I would narrow it down to something less haram or traif than sexual fetish. I think I would like to explore “fetish” in terms of Commodity fetishism. I would, after giving them a reading as home work (and re-enforcing it with a one page in-class bullet-point reading) ask the class to bring in a visual digital image from their commute to school.
I would create a worksheet/checklist that they could use to analyze the fetish object, break them into pairs and ask each pair to analyze each other’s fetish. Each group would be responsible for presenting on one of the two objects.
An interesting idea with a very specific idea of how you might introduce it to your classroom. What I’m unclear on is if this is building on/connected to the current theme you teach in LIB200 or if this is the beginnings of a new theme? If the former, then how does it build on your current readings/concepts; if the latter, what else might you connect to this to build it out into a whole course?