Week 1 - The Learning Journal

We began Semester 2 with an introduction to the Architects learning journals, in which we are supposed to record our interactions with the texts and how we associated with them outside of the lecture environment. It is supposed to represent 'personal academic reflection', so I decided to use a 'blog' format to record my musings on the subject.

The plan for the next 10 weeks is to observe and read critics focused on 'modernity', dealing with issues such as -

• dominance of technology
• nationality
• secularisation
• moral relativism 
• localised and emergent modernities
• western and eurocentric concepts

We have previously had a grounding in the works of Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, in order to build up to these more modern critics. During our lecture we also looked at how analytical psychology had largely emerged after defining historical events, showing that Hegel was inspired by the French Revolution. We therefore established the Holocaust as the most contemporary epochal event of the 20th Century, and discussed what ramifications this might have for the relevance of the works we're currently reading. Marx, for example, was once associated with 'freedom', but is now instead a symbol for totalitarianism.  

Hopefully in this blog I will be able to compare the contemporary message of the writers with a more modern interpretation. 200 words is, of course, a limiting factor, and for the weeks in which I found the reading a struggle I'll focus more on the text itself than alternative interpretations. However, I do want to apply these thoughts and ideas to a modern psyche, in order to see how the chronological progression of human consciousness has altered their meanings.

nb - I have decided that in most, if not all, of the posts, I will try and add a little graphic of my own representing the work/s read that week