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I DREAMED I SAW JOE HILL LAST NIGHT--OVERVIEW
ESSENTIALS
WISE WORDS
"Tell me and I will forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I will understand."
--Kurt Hahn
READINGS
CURRENT WORK
PAST
SIMULATIONS
OVERVIEW
Northern Illinois University undergraduate course COMS 496C, Special Topics in Communication Theory (External Organizational Communication), continues an earlier graduate level course, COMS 573 (later renumbered 673), Seminar in External Organizational Communication. Beginning in 2006, these courses have focused on analyzing and finding solutions to problems in external organizational communication, relying in each instance on a completely different, imaginative, extensive, semester-long simulation of a conflictual situation with broad-ranging social consequences.
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Some of these simulations (for individual descriptions, link from side menu "Past Simulations") have been set in fantastic and/or futuristic environments, such as the imaginary apprehension and trial of the virtual anarchist Saavedro (Brad Dourif) from the video game Myst III: Exile, in The Trial of Saavedro; the explosive tensions boiling to the surface in the secret Icelandic undersea alien-human enclave of A Murder in Crihloth (Spring 2007); and the post-Apocalyptic nuclear-war-scarred wasteland of the western United States in Truck Stop at the End of the World (Spring 2009), the latter two of which were set in the year 2023. Another fantasy scenario, The League of the Last Resort (Spring 2012), brought together protagonists from previous simulations, via space/time travel, to forestall the catastrophic effects of Hurricane Katrina.
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Some words from Jack Sparrow
(that's "Captain," "Captain Jack Sparrow")
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"We shall need a crossbow, an hourglass, three goats, one of us must learn to play the trumpet, whilst the other one goes like this."
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Other simulations have taken place in the near future, such as the religio-political drama The Dreams of Auriane (Spring 2008) or in the more or less near past, such as the tripartite historical era meditation on the death of Sonny Liston, Original G (Fall 2009). The Ukraine-based tale of a conflicted woman with a famous name she cannot shake, suddenly thrown into the spotlight of a game-show sensation, That Certain Female (Spring 2011), was the first simulation set strictly in the here-and-now of the present.
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One recent simulation, Waltzing Matilda (Spring 2013), was the first to be set in a more distant historical time/place, the labor struggles erupting in the Australian outback of the 1890s, which some claim gave rise to the country's most famous song. This was followed by other simulations set in identifiable historical circumstances, such as the hard-driving, hard-drinking moonshine world (centered in 1955 Harlan, Kentucky) of My Family's Always Been in Whiskey (Spring 2014) and the 2004 Fallujah, Iraq, incursion of 'Dad's Gonna Kill Me (Spring 2015). The most recent simulation, Nothin' But a Man, is set in Harlem, New York, during the 1920s, in the midst of what we now know as the Harlem Renaissance. This fall's simulation, I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night, takes on the tragedy of immigrant farm labor through the eyes of a disabled organizer-in-training and the most iconic labor leader of the last century, brought together by an ancient Afro-Carribean religious ritual.
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