Instruction
Final Project Guidelines:
Regardless of whether you managed to get your fieldwork done before the pandemic or if you are going to be using your pandemic-related blogs as field notes, here are some pointers to get you on the right track.
1. Provide plenty of informative detail:
a. When: timeframe, if talking about a particular one-time occurrence, date
and time. How long did you observe?
b. Where: specific location. For example, if you are writing about coronavirus-
related observations, specify WHERE you are in the city (or outside of the city), give some details about the neighborhood (this goes for any topic); situate the reader.
c. What: what are you writing about? This is simple, but you do need to identify the focus of your observations.
d. Who: make sure that you let us know who you are observing (doesn’t need to be names or anything like that, but some details about the people you are writing about)
e. Why: the reason you are focusing on one aspect over another. No matter what you are writing about, there are many possibilities in terms of what to zoom in on: think about which situations you are going to highlight and really get into and then think about why you were pulled in this direction.
2. Can you use some of our readings to make better sense of any of your observations? You should be able to apply at least some of the concepts from the articles we read in the class. If you want to use other sources, you are welcome to, just run them by me to make sure they are legitimate. We read about different approaches to understanding how our society functions: Geertz, Weber, Durkheim, Mauss, Adorno & Horkheimer, and others all had distinct ideas, in which they believed, and which they developed over time as tools to gain a deeper understanding of the world. We don’t have to agree with any of them, but we can use their (and other) theories and approaches to look at our world and the situations around us. It is a bit like trying on clothes at the store: You pick one pair of pants, try it on, see what it feels like. Then you try on another. You may like one better than the other, or you may not like any of them at all, but you understand why: the pants can be flattering, tight, loose, fit well in one place but not another, be too short, too long, and so on – you get it. The theories and approaches are essentially all pairs of intellectual pants. We try them out to see if they help us understand or appreciate something we notice around us, if we can explain the way people act and react through one of these outlooks. Then we move to the next approach and see what that does if we apply it to the same situation or a different one. And so on.
3. Make sure you are not simply writing down your feelings. This is okay for the blog posts, but in the final paper, what we really want to focus on (and of course you can state opinions or even mention if something makes you feel a certain way, just so
long as it is not the main agenda of the paper) are observations. Things you notice. Things you want to explain to yourself and/or others. Things you find confusing, which you then try to spin through one of the approaches we have studied and read about, to perhaps lower the confusion level. Things that affect you strongly: think about WHY that is. What social/cultural factors are at play in any and all situations you might be observing and describing. This is what we want here.