Happy mid-semester crunch, everyone. This week I’d like you to begin the process of thinking about what topic you’d like to focus on for Core Assignments 3 & 4, which together make up one great research project. This project will culminate in a 7-8 page research paper with documented scholarly sources.
The purpose of this paper will be to identify an area of study that interests you, to read what professional researchers have uncovered in that area of study, and to add your own arguments to the field. It’s meant to be an illuminating and fun experience.
To begin, we’ll take a look at the introduction to Michelle Alexander’s important text The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. This book endeavors to advance our collective thinking about the American prison system, allowing us to understand it as “modern day slavery,” so that we may begin to abolish it as it exists today. It is also in its own right a book-length research project, citing hundreds of studies.
Next, you’ll begin to brainstorm your own topics for research.
What you need to do this week:
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- Read the Introduction to The New Jim Crow. Write a blog post where you address the quote “we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.” Explain your understanding of this quote, and how Alexander uses research to back up this statement, setting us up to read the rest of her book. Please write your post by Thursday, 10/22 at noon.
- Write comments on 2 blog posts by Friday, 10/23 at 5PM.
- Review my slides from class on Monday. Replicating the exercise and follow the steps in this presentation to write 3 preliminary broad topics for your research paper. Then, write 3 research questions for each possible topic. Come to our class Zoom next Monday with these topics and questions typed and ready to workshop.
Can’t wait to see what you come up with! 🙂