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Final Project Paper Guidelines, Sam and Eric

As you approach the end of fieldwork for America Abroad, you face the challenge of making sense of the documents you have compiled over the past eight or so weeks, whether they are in the form of field notes, interview transcripts, newspaper articles, photographs, video, or memory.  The sense you make of these documents-your interpretations of the patterns of significance you find-will need to be woven into narrative form, of approximately twenty-five pages in length.  What shape that narrative will take is largely of your own choosing.  You may choose to follow the conventions of one of the various disciplinary genres we have encountered through the program, such as anthropology, sociology, journalism, oral history, cultural studies, folklore, philosophy, or fiction.*  Or, you may blur these genres to create a hybrid text that enables a complex expression of your observations, experiences, and interpretations.  What is important is that you find a form of writing that both inspires you to write and addresses the questions at the core of your inquiry.  The paper is not simply an exercise in writing, but is a journey of thought.  It should be used to synthesize your observations, experiences, and recordings in the field into a coherent reflection that you find useful personally, and in relation to wider scholarly or activist goals.

 

Before writing the paper you should refer back to the handout we distributed in fall quarter entitled "What is a Project?"  This document is available under the category "Assignments/Handouts" on the America Abroad website.  The handout makes a number of critical distinctions to bear in mind as you shape the character of your project paper. 

What should be included in your paper?  This, of course, will vary considerably depending on the kinds of work you carried out and the genre(s) of writing you choose. 

You may want to situate your inquiry within the literature you read before and during your major project fieldwork.  In doing so you should in some way address the oft dreaded question "so what?"  What is the relevance of this project to a particular field of knowledge or to human understanding more broadly?         

You will probably want to include some sort of methodological discussion that clarifies how you came to know what you know about the subject of your inquiry.  This might entail reporting on specific numbers of interviewees, locations of observation, and extent of familiarity with informants, as well as a reflexive assessment of how your own social positioning, your language competencies, and your frames of perception may have shaped your fieldwork experiences. 

The core of your paper should be your reckoning with what you actually encountered over the past eight weeks.  For some, you might think of this as the key "evidence" that substantiates the claims you make in attempting to answer the questions of your inquiry.  For others, this may entail documentation that reveals something meaningful about the character of the people or places you encountered, similar to what Joseph Mitchell did in Up in the Old Hotel.   

Finally, the paper should contain a substantial conclusion.  This might be an ending that conveys the weight of what has been explored through the course of the paper or a more formal conclusion that summarizes the findings of the research and includes some final reflections.

Your paper, full-length and well polished, is due at the first program meeting, on Monday, May 5, at 9:30am, when we'll meet in Sem2 D1105.  If, for any reason, you are unable to attend this class, your seminar leader must receive a copy by e-mail or other means by this time. It's a true deadline

We will hold individual paper conferences with each student during the weeks of May 5 and May 12 to discuss revisions. 

The revised, final paper is due, both to your seminar leader and posted on the America Abroad website, on May 29.

________

*Note: By "fiction" we don't mean inventing or altering evidence, but rather the use of literary devices in telling your story about the project. In the inquiry of our program, the challenge is fidelity to what actually occurs.

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