Below you’ll find two options for the final project in the course. The first is a traditional essay. The second gives you an opportunity to work more collaboratively and, perhaps, be adventurous in a different way, since you’ve already completed two essays for the class. Whichever work you choose, the project is due by May 27 at 4pm.

1) Choose three texts (or films) from class this semester and discuss how they treat the boundaries of the human. Are human beings understood as a privileged life form? Are human minds and bodies distinct from machines and other life forms (animals, monsters, bioengineered creations, etc) or intertwined physically and emotionally with them? Do the texts seem to think that unity with machines and other life forms will be a powerful response to oppressive, even dystopian, social conditions in the world of the stories? Or do the texts suggest that such blending and breaking of boundaries will only intensify dystopian possibilities? Perhaps they see both resistance to dystopia and the creation of it at the same time.
• You must include one movie and one written text among your three primary sources. The movie could be from any one of the student presentations this semester, including your own, or be one of the other films required for the class.
• If you want to discuss primary sources from beyond the class, that may be possible, but you must clear that with me in advance.
• The work should be 8-9 pages long and is due by May 27th at 4pm.

2) Many of the films and texts we’ve explored imagine alterations to life in imagined groups and communities. As an individual or in a team of of two or three, imagine a disruptive invention or specific unexpected change and its impact on some part of the world as you know it. What are the butterfly effects of the single disruption you’ve imagined in a specific area or on a specific population, real or imagined?

Develop a narrative in the voice of either a news reporter (as in War of the Worlds), a natural scientist (as in Annihilation), or an observing anthropologist (as in Leguin’s “The Question of Sex”). Your job is to report back observations about change, what you do and don’t understand, how people (or other creatures) are reacting.

This assignment gives you significant leeway, but you must 1) come up with an invention or change 2) Situate it in a real or imagined place 3) Report in some meaningful way through a journal, diary, or other written document what an observant individual sees in the altered universe 4) Be specfic, so that your work has tangible, observable elements to it that aren’t overwhelmingly broad. For instance, you should not emphasize that “around the world sea levels rose two feet overnight, inundating coastal settlements everywhere.” You might, though, emphasize that only in one small town on the Georgia coast, but only in that town, sea levels rose two feet.

Finally, you may submit this work either in writing or as a podcast/recording. If you turn in only written work, if should be about six pages for a group of one or two or nine pages for a group of 3. If you record, you’ll still need a written script, so turn that in with your work. Don’t just improvise in front of a microphone. A recording will give different members of a group a chance to speak in different voices, and, introduce other audio features. If you turn in a recording, each person should be audible at some point–as a witness, a reporter, or the observing narrator. The total time of the recording should be about 4 minutes if you work alone, six minutes for groups of two, or 9 minutes for groups of three.

This option requires a different and somewhat less familiar kind of writing and organization than a traditional essay, so it also requires less writing on a per person basis.

The work is due by May 27th at 4pm.

3) In the last section of class, we’ve seen SF speculate climate catastrophe and the dystopian possibilities of late-stage capitalism, but different texts and films do this in very different ways. The worlds of different works are physically different from one another, and so is the altered consciousness of characters who live in them. How, in three different texts/movies, has environmental change altered the minds, habits, bodies or beliefs of central characters? Why are those changes important? At what specific point in your sources are the changes clearly evident?