Part One: Answer three of the following short answer questions.
1. Why does X so freak out the adults around him/her?
2. Why does Alisa Valdes Rodriguez struggle so much with body image? What's driving her identity crisis?
3. Is it smart or a fool's errand to attempt to control nature, whether human or the natural world around us? Why?
4. In "Unwanted: Muslims Next Door," an older resident of Murfreesboro, TN uses the phrases "They say..." and "I have heard..." when referring to Muslims. What does she mean? How does this lay in to our discussion of 'difference' versus 'political correctness'?
5. In Decolonising the Mind, NgugiwaThiong'o writes that colonialism is like a "cultural bomb [that] annihilate[s] a people's belief in their names, in their languages, in their environments, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves." What does he mean?
6. Foucault delineates a difference between 'discipline' and 'punishment.' Discuss.
7. To what purpose does Angela Carter rewrite classic fairy tales and folktales?
Part Two: Answer one of the following longer essay questions.
1. The last half of the semester has covered texts in which cultures, both dominant and minority, find themselves at odds. Why? What is it about culture-and its striving to dominate and/or control-that we should recognize and try to change (if anything)?
2. If you had to teach a class on Cultural Studies, how would you do it? Design your own class: focus it how you want, chooses the texts to be studied, and discuss what you would want students to take from the class.
3. Cultural Studies seems to come at things from a Marxist and lower class/culture perspective. Why? Discuss the idea of cultural studies as an answer to the various privileged statuses (race, class, gender, etc). Is it? Does it have an effective response to what "they" see as the problems plaguing culture in general?