SOC 281 GRADES
As indicated in the syllabus: Life History Project (%15), Media Analysis (%15), Midterm (%30), Final (%40)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PLEASE NOTE THAT THE DEADLINE FOR THE 2ND EXERCISE IS DECEMBER 24TH, MONDAY. YOU CAN FIND THE REST OF THE INFORMATION ABOUT THE EXERCISE BELOW
Exercise II: Media Analysis
Please choose one news
article from national or international print media that is related with one of
our course themes:
Subsistence patterns
Food production/scarcity
The new global economy
Gender roles
Family and kinship
Mothering practices
Colonialism/Post-colonialism
State power
Urban transformation
projects
Urban inequalities
You will be writing an
essay of minimum 1500, maximum 2500
words (double spaced in 12 point type, stapled!) demonstrating how the anthropological
concepts/ideas/examples from the texts and/or class discussion are useful in analyzing
this news item. You can pretend in your essay that you are trying to
convince a group of students and/or professors of anthropology that this news
article should be used in anthropology classes because…..
The example you choose can
be good or bad example that can be
used in an anthropology course to demonstrate certain concepts/ideas. The point
is to be able demonstrate convincingly in what ways this is good or bad example
to use in an anthropology course.
Besides the
anthropological concepts/ideas/examples you will be using, you can keep the
following questions in mind in organizing your essay, you do not need to answer
all of these questions:
How is the news
reported/narrated/represented?
What kind of language is
used in reporting the news, what are the implications of this kind of a
language?
Is the source of the news
cited, what are the implications of citing or not citing the source?
What are the power
relations/inequalities in the news, are they transparent?
What are the issues that
are NOT included in the news?
Grading
This exercise constitutes
15% of your grade. The criteria I will use in grading this exercise involve:
Submission of the essay on time in
the required format, the extent to which you make use of anthropological
concepts/ideas/examples from class material to make your argument, the
convincing argument you develop in your essay.
Deadline
You should submit your
essays as hard copy on December 24th, 2018 Monday by 17:00.
There will be a box outside
of my office. The news item MUST
be handed in with your essay. No email links please!
Any questions, problems,
emergencies about the project, please contact me SOON AS POSSIBLE. Please DO
NOT WAIT UNTIL THE LAST MINUTE to solve any problems you might encounter.
I am looking forward to
read your essays!
Information about EXERCISE I Life History Project
PLEASE NOTE THAT THE DEADLINE IS OCT. 31, 2018 (Wednesday)
DETAILS ARE BELOW
DETAILS ARE BELOW
Objective of the
Project
The objective of this project is to familiarize you with a frequently
used methodology in social anthropology, and to give you a chance to analyze
and contextualize a life history within a wider social, cultural, historical,
and political context.
As part of this exercise, you are expected to conduct an
interview (hopefully more than once) with an individual of your choice focusing
on his/her life history. You will be writing an essay of minimum 1000, maximum
1500 words (double spaced in 12 point type) based on the analysis of this life
history. I am fully aware that you are not professional anthropologists and
therefore I do not expect a highly professional essay. But I do expect you to
take this exercise seriously, conduct such an interview, think about your
material, analyze the life history and write an analytical essay about it.
Who to Interview?
The first thing you should keep in mind is that we are NOT
after exotic and sensational stories. This exercise is about understanding and
analyzing life histories. You should start with the assumption that there is nothing
inherently interesting about anyone’s life history. In other words, everyone
has an interesting life history and it depends on how you approach it and how
you attempt to analyze it in a wider social, cultural, historical, and
political context.
Since interviewing someone about his/her life history
requires some form of a trust relationship that cannot be built immediately, I highly
recommend that you choose someone you are already familiar with and already
have a rapport with. But this person should not be someone that you are very
close with such as your best friend or lover.
Ethical Issues
There are series of ethical issues you need to keep in mind
both during the interview and the write-up phase of this exercise. You should
make sure that the person you will be interviewing gives his/her informed consent to this project. What
this means is that this person should know what this project is about, who will
be reading this and for what purpose. Not causing any form of physical, social,
and psychological harm to your informants, and protecting their privacy are key
ethical concerns in any form of anthropological research. It is critical that
you keep these concerns in mind during and after the interview process. You
should not push your informants to talk about topics that they feel
uncomfortable about. During the write-up phase of the project, you should use
pseudonyms (nick names, made-up names) to protect the privacy of your
informants. Your informants should be informed about these issues BEFORE you
start the project.
Interviewing
Here are some tips for you that might help during the
interviews:
-
You should inform the person you will interview
about what the project is, how it will be used, who will read it for what
purposes. I encourage you to meet more than once, so you should make sure that
your informant has the time to spare for this project
-
Tape recording can be a very useful and
convenient way of recording the interviews. BUT, you should also get your
informant’s consent for this and if there is any kind of discomfort for your
informant for the recording of the interview, you should not insist, and
instead you should take notes.
-
The main point in life history interviewing is
to get your informant to talk about their life: different phases, institutional
engagements (family, education, health, state etc.), movement (for different
purposes: education, forced migration, marriage etc.), occupation etc. Your
informants will probably not talk about their lives using these concepts. These
concepts will be useful for your analysis and might help in guiding your
questions.
-
It is easier to start your interviews with some
basic demographic, concrete information (places lived, schools attended, family
make-up etc.)
-
Don’t worry about the chronology of the life
history-that is something you can reconstruct. Your informants may get side
tracked by different aspects of their lives, be patient and listen. You should
ask them to elaborate on certain aspects of their lives (eg. why their families
moved, changed jobs, how these affected their lives etc.), ask for
clarifications and expansions.
-
The point of the life history interview is NOT
to judge people. This does not mean that you should not engage in a dialogue
with your informants but you should be sensitive about where to draw the line.
-
You should also be sensitive about any
discomfort that your informant might feel. You should be ready not to push for
topics that your informant does not feel comfortable with.
Analysis and Write-up
Your final report should be in an essay form rather than
your raw interview notes or transcriptions. Your essay should start by
explaining why you chose that particular person, where and when you conducted
the interviews, anything else you want to discuss regarding the interviewing
process. In the rest of the essay, you should provide an analysis of this life
history. Here are some questions that might help you to contextualize the
information you have into a wider social, cultural, political, and historical
context: In what ways you can relate the information you have to larger issues,
concepts, and institutions such as the economy, state, education, family,
social class, gender, migration, religion etc., what are the major continuities
and ruptures in this life history, how can you make sense of these? What does
this life history tell us about the wider society and the historical context?
Grading
This exercise constitutes 15% of your grade. The criteria I
will use in grading this exercise involve: Submission of the essay on time in
the required format, the extent to which you make use of
sociological/anthropological concepts and categories in your analysis.
Deadline
You should submit your essays as hard copy on OCTOBER 31st,
2018 (Wednesday). If you are unable to come to class that day, you should
put your essay in my mailbox in the sociology department. Please DO NOT EMAIL
YOUR ASSIGNMENTS.
Any questions, problems, emergencies about the project,
please contact me AS SOON AS POSSIBLE, so that we can find solutions to your
problems. Please DO NOT WAIT UNTIL THE LAST MINUTE to solve any problems you
might encounter.
Here is a link to an interesting interview with Nancy Scheper-Hughes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYu6VMC_42k
Here are some suggestions for documentaries that might be of interest especially in relation to patterns of production:
http://blackgoldmovie.com
You can download for free Meat Atlas: Facts and Figures About the Animals We Eat (2014)
https://www.foeeurope.org/sites/default/files/publications/foee_hbf_meatatlas_jan2014.pdf
No comments:
New comments are not allowed.