Moira Hodges

December 2010

Senior Paper

Redefining Mental Health

Firstly, I loved seeing everyone's presentations on Thursday. It's fascinating to me just that everyone came up with so many different ways to reflect on the experience of this course!

As for my group and our Taboo game, I thought it went well. We were hoping to represent just how difficult it is to define and represent what we mean by these problematic, forever-in-air-quotes terms like "fact," "fiction," and "truth." We stumbled upon the idea of making a taboo game in talking about how as the semester had progressed. We realized then that we had turned some of these buzzword terms into taboos of sorts--and thus the light bulb of inspiration was lit :)

 For our final performance, we made a video that uses the progression of our friendship as a metaphor for the evolution of our class' discussions. 

So, I'm really unhappy I didn't have this ready in time to show to the class, but I'm going to post a powerpoint of it as soon as possible. Basically it's a collection of pages loosely tied together by string, to symbolize the looseness but also connectedness of the different media we experienced (composite word for "watched," "read," etc.). Also to make it so the paper doesn't break when I try to fold the pages over one another. Each page contains a statement that answers the open question "Reality is..." and contains student commentary on each work, either addressing what reality was when we were reading/watching whatever it was, or contesting the statement, or agreeing with it, or even just making commentary on the work. There is one page for each work we read.

 Prezi Presentation

My group and I created our own game of Taboo using some of the "taboo" words we have come across this semester. Some of the words included reality, non-fiction, truth, fact, etc. To come up with a list of words that could not be used to describe the main word, I basically made a list of antonyms and synonyms. What I found, similar to what I saw when we were looking up dictionary definitions of the words earlier in the course, was that many of these words are listed as synonyms and antonyms of each other even though we have definitely found clear distinctions between them during the course of this class.