Revised deadlines:
Assignment | Deadline |
Blog Post 5: Cluster 2 (four scholarly sources) | Monday, May 16th |
Blog Post 6: Research Project Prospectus | Friday, May 20th |
Working Draft of Research Paper | Week 9 at scheduled individual conference with Tamara, beginning on Monday, May 23rd |
Peer Review of Working Drafts | Wednesday, May 25th in section meeting |
Final Draft of Research Paper to EEE Dropbox and turnitin.com | Friday, June 3rd at midnight |
Details about writing your prospectus:
The prospectus is a concise document in which you delineate your central claims and think through the organizational structure of your research paper.
The first paragraph should introduce your artifact (what) and cultural context(s) (who, where, and when) to your reader, a brief description how you intend to close read your artifact (vivid physical description of an object, rhetorical analysis of language, formal or technical analysis of visual or filmic composition, etc.). This paragraph should also present your preliminary thesis statement. This thesis may be more than one sentence. Ultimately, it must delineate the humanistic significance of this artifact for a particular cultural context. In as sense, you must present a specific, argumentative claim about how and why your artifact generates meaning in a given cultural milieu.
The second paragraph is about how you situate and contextualize your project. You should outline the significance of your project and the central humanistic research questions that motivate your inquiry. You should also define the disciplinary perspectives you will engage in your analysis and explain if and how you intend to take an interdisciplinary (related to more than one branch of knowledge) approach.
In the third paragraph, you will briefly introduce disciplinary approaches that scholars have taken towards this topic and the scholarly conversations that you have located to cluster your secondary sources. This will form the basis of your paper’s literature review, the term we use in university writing to describe a survey of the existing scholarly work on the subject. Possible modes of “clustering” your secondary sources:
- Sources that provide historical/cultural context for your artifact
- Sources that present some kind of interpretive/theoretical lens (e.g. philosophy, literary studies, history, visual culture, psychology, sociology, economics, cultural studies, gender and sexuality studies, race/ethic studies, etc.) for understanding or interpreting your artifact
- Sources that present an interpretive debate about what your artifact (or artifacts like it, if scholars have not addressed your object in particular) means in a given cultural context
- Sources that present an interpretive debate about what artifacts of the same genre or type as yours mean in a given cultural context
If, in your research, you have discovered a gap in the scholarly conversation (i.e., an artifact/type of artifact/context that scholars don’t seem interested in talking about or don’t seem interested in talking about in the way that you think is most apt) you should succinctly delineate what scholars have neglected and why you think that gap exists. If you have discovered that two different scholarly disciplines research this type of artifact or its attendant cultural context but don’t appear to be in conversation with one another, you should delineate why you think a lack of interdisciplinary exchange appears in your research. You will not identify specific scholarly claims in this paragraph, unless one scholar or text looms particularly large in the academic conversation on your topic (i.e., if the conversation is dominated by one particular scholar or text or if your thesis about the artifact extends or contradicts a central reading in the scholarly discussion of this topic), in which case you can engage specifically with that argument or individual.
The final paragraph should identify what you hope to find in your research and how you see your project in relationship to the existing scholarship. Do you see yourself extending or deepening an existing field of inquiry? Illuminating a gap or neglected area of inquiry? Giving voice to a marginalized population? Providing a new way of examining a well-trod historical context? Establishing a possible paradigm for examining other artifacts like the one you have chosen? Bringing together disciplines or fields that aren’t currently in conversation with each other? Your conclusion will need to describe the larger significance of not only your artifact, but also of the research and analysis that you have presented in your paper.