Using terms and concepts from the course, combined with examples from your own life, write an essay in which you reflect on the arguments made by Adorno and Horkheimer (and Critical Theorists generally) about the influence of the Culture Industry as it relates to your own consciousness and way of life.

Mini assignment 1: The Culture Industry
Overview: for this mini assignment you are going to assess Adorno and Horkheimer’s neoMarxist argument about the prominence (and bleakness) of the Culture Industry in relation to your life. In what ways and to what degree is your consciousness impacted by the Culture Industry?
Details
Step #1: Reflect on your life for a while—what do you do with most of your time, what type of things do you talk about with others, how do you spend your “spare time,” etc.
Step #2: Using terms and concepts from the course, combined with examples from your own life, write an essay in which you reflect on the arguments made by Adorno and Horkheimer (and Critical Theorists generally) about the influence of the Culture Industry as it relates to your own consciousness and way of life. Does the Culture Industry represent a form of social control over your life/consciousness? To what degree and in what ways does it have control over your life? Are you complicit to Cultural Totalitarianism? If “control” is too strong a word, then how does it influence your life? How might this be different than, say, how religion or anything else controls people (in other cultures/historical time periods)? Please note: this mini assignment needs some thoughtful self-reflection to do well.
Step #3: Post your essay in the Mini assignments section.
Mini Assignment 2: Indigenizing the University
Using the ideas presented by Leroy Little Bear, answer the following: how we can use these Blackfoot ideas to decolonize/Indigenize the university? In writing your answer, make sure to draw on Little Bear’s concepts and use his terms.
(Please note: Indigenizing the university means that we are making the university–whether that be the administrative system, organization, forms, webpage, classes, courses, and/or anything else at the university–more inclusive of Indigenous ways of thinking, knowing and doing. As such, you can talk about any one–or more–of these aspects of the university in terms of how to decolonize/Indigenize the university).

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