States of Belonging is a collaborative teaching project in which you will work both independently and with your peers to interpret historical sources that speak to the history of national identity and political power in Latin America since 1800. Your primary assignment this semester is to create a storymap through which you are to bring together class materials (readings, lectures, videos, etc.), selected historical sources, and experiences from your own life to reflect on the meaning of national identity and citizenship.
The storymap is not a paper. Although I do have some specific requirements for your project, our goal is not to write a typical college expository essay. Instead, your storymap will be a multimedia website, where you will use text, images, and maps to present your analyses and to draw connections. You are encouraged to play with the platform and experiment with different ways of representing your experiences and interpretations. This is a space for you to experiment with how you best express your intellect, free from (at least some) of the restrictions of a normal college paper.
To illustrate, see exemplar storymaps from prior semesters here: Sample Storymaps.
Steps:
One
We will begin the semester with materials on this site and shared readings that will orient our approach to analyzing nationalism and nation-states in Latin America.
TWO
Then, each of you will draft a short “Personal Essay on Citizenship and Nationalism,” through which you will assess what you already know about these subjects in order to consider how to approach the history that we are studying.
THREE
Each of you will peruse a curated collection of historical sources and choose one theme to pursue for your work this semester. See: Themes and Sources
FOUR
Over the remainder of the semester, you will select a handful of sources about your theme to interpret and analyze. You will use these to draft your storymap which we will build piece by piece over the latter half of the course.
FIVE
You will receive feedback from the professor along the way, but also periodically you will also exchange ideas, interpretations, and your storymaps with members of a small group of peers who are working on the same theme as you.
SIX
The final storymap will integrate personal experience, primary historical sources, and class materials and notes to form a focused and deep analysis of the meaning of national identity and citizenship in the past, the present, and maybe the future.
