2019-2020 Spring: Research Project

 

Assignment

After evaluating multiple primary sources and surveying the scholarly conversation that surrounds potential topics, select a primary source related to our cycle theme of Animal/Culture. Conduct extensive research on the topic, and then compose an expository academic paper that makes an argument about your chosen primary source’s humanistic significance. How does the form or genre of the primary source shape its meaning? How did the primary source come to make meaning, in what contexts, and for what audiences? How do other scholars understand and interpret this primary source or ones like it? How does your own humanistic interpretation of the primary source enter a larger scholarly conversation?

Your primary source and research questions must be approved by your seminar instructor. As part of the research process, you will produce a series of prewriting and reflective components, including a research blog and multimodal presentation of your findings on your website. The required prewriting components will be determined by your seminar instructor and must be completed in the order assigned. Your final Research Paper must incorporate and engage in depth with at least 6 scholarly, peer-reviewed articles or books and should be 12–15 pages (approximately 4000-5000 words).

Learning Goals

• Reinforce and hone compositional skills acquired to date in Humanities Core: to make specific, clear, arguable claims; to produce unified, cohesive body paragraphs; to integrate well-selected evidence from primary and scholarly secondary sources; to exhibit fluid transitions between ideas, and to develop a rhetorically-effective title, introduction, and conclusion
• Adopt the appropriate stance, style, and genre conventions of humanistic research-based writing as well as the methodology/methodologies relevant to the chosen primary source (e.g., cultural/ethnic studies, literary, visual, filmic, historical, and/or philosophical analysis)
• Demonstrate the capacity to critically survey, read, and assess primary sources and scholarly conversations across a variety of genres and media
• Demonstrate advanced information literacy skills by locating, evaluating, and integrating information gathered from multiple sources (the university library, online academic databases, and digitized archival collections) into a research project
• Develop digital literacy, public writing, and transferable technical skills through research blogging and the multimodal presentation of research findings
• Demonstrate flexible strategies for generating, revising, editing, and proofreading drafts while also actively reflecting on the process of writing and research

Required Reading

You may find it worthwhile to revisit the chapters you read in the Humanities Core Handbook during the fall and winter quarters— especially those in Part II: Guide to Writing and Research in Humanities Core (pp. 97–200)—as you conduct research and draft your paper. In addition, please read the following this quarter:

• Beauchamp, Tamara. “Selecting the Primary Source for Your Research Project.” Digital Supplement to the Humanities Core Handbook. [PDF]
• Morse, Susan. “Developing Academic Titles, Introductions, and Conclusions.” Humanities Core Handbook, XanEdu, 2019, pp. 135–47.
• Buhanan, Kurt. “Film Analysis.” Humanities Core Handbook, XanEdu, 2019, pp. 76–85.
• Yaniga, Annie. “Cultural Studies and Ethnography.” Humanities Core Handbook, Xanedu, 2019 pp. 86–96.

The Writing Process

We face a difficult task in Spring 2020 in taking the capstone Humanities Core Research Project online as part of the campus-wide shift to remote learning and social distancing. In fact, much of what we had hoped for you to learn is the value of in-person, hands-on humanistic research—be it in the library stacks, in Special Collections & Archives, or in close discussion with your seminar instructor and peers. We must all be pragmatic about the fact that there are limitations posed by the remote learning context, both to your ability to conduct research and to our ability to support your projects.

At the same time, much of the work of scholarly research in the 21st century takes place online and we are lucky to have a wide range of digital resources through UCI Libraries at our disposal, even when we are off-campus. And while many of you who are no longer on campus will not have the opportunity to consult print sources or work directly with a unique object like those you perused in the Primary Source Workshops last quarter, we still are committed to helping you achieve the learning goals listed above, despite the constraints posed by this context.

As you can likely tell from those Learning Goals, the spring Research Project is an integrative and culminative experience of the Humanities Core program as a whole. We hope that you can take the academic writing skills and tools of rhetorical, literary, visual, and historical analysis that you have developed in the past two quarters—as well as those you will learn this spring in cultural studies, critical theory, and film and media studies—and apply them to a topic that interests and excites you. We invite you to take an expansive view of what “the animal” in Animal/Culture might mean, just like our lecturing faculty have done. Many of our lectures have explored how we anthropomorphize other species in art and literature. As humans, we even invent creatures—remember the unicorns in medieval bestiaries, the talking hoopoe and his companions in The Conference of the Birds, the enchanted donkey-human hybrid in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or Calvin’s pretend tiger Hobbes? As we’ve seen in the lectures this year, animals can be real or imaginary, allegorical or literal.

But while non-human animals are used across cultures as figurations or symbols that reflect on human behaviors and customs, the historians in Humanities Core have shown us that they are also sources of companionship, entertainment, sport, transportation, medicine, food, and biomass energy for our species. If you decide to write about a topic involving “real” animals, as opposed to symbolic ones, the research questions that you pursue in this project still must be humanistic (i.e., how and why questions about what people think, do, and make). For example, say you were writing about the 2005 movie March of the Penguins. Your research questions would not be about penguin migration or mating patterns (topics that would certainly be better addressed in an animal behavior class in the School of Biological Sciences). Rather, you would likely explore how formal components of the film’s creation like cinematography and editing situate the film within a larger genre of wildlife documentaries and mediate the viewer’s experience as that of a spectator of “nature.” While some of your secondary sources might come from disciplines outside of the humanities, the majority of your sources should reflect the kinds of interpretive methodologies that you have been learning about over the course of the year.

Even more so than the other academic expository essays you have written this year, the research project is all about the process. In your seminar, you will be completing a range of scaffolded assignments that will help you to select a feasible topic, identify and engage with secondary sources, and generate your own interpretive intervention into a larger scholarly conversation. Along the way, you will be writing for multiple audiences. Many of the prewriting assignments you will undertake are part of formal academic genres; for example, the prospectus is a formal proposal to an academic supervisor or committee (in this case, your seminar instructor) that your research is feasible and will produce a worthwhile contribution to a field of study. The audience for this type of prewriting assignment—as well as your final research paper—is an academic one. You should envision yourself addressing lecturing faculty, your seminar instructor, and your peers, in as much as they are also immersed in the humanistic study of Animal/Culture and thus represent a preliminary scholarly community for your ideas. Perhaps more importantly, you should envision yourself addressing the scholars in the field or fields you will be exploring, interacting and arguing with them across space and time through your writing. While we certainly don’t expect that you will be an expert in your field by June (though you will certainly be able to identity who is!), you should anticipate that you will likely know much more about your particular topic by the end of the quarter than your seminar instructor.

In parallel to the more formal academic prewriting assignments, you have the opportunity to write in a more exploratory, personal, and reflective way about your research and writing process on your website. Your audience in that space is a larger online public, one to whom you will have to provide necessary context and whom you can engage using the visual and multimedia capacities of the medium. We encourage you to use your creativity to communicate about your research to that audience and to expand your skills in digital publication and presentation this quarter.

Many students find that the work they do in the spring quarter of Humanities Core forms the foundation of their undergraduate theses or sparks their interest for future graduate study. You can read award-winning examples from past cycles of Humanities Core on our Student Awards page; be aware, however, that these past students were writing about a different theme than Animal/Culture and may have had different technical expectations in place for their projects.

If you encounter limitations due to remote learning that make it difficult to successfully complete components of this project, please contact your seminar instructor. The Course Director Nasrin Rahimieh (nasrin.rahimieh@uci.edu) and Writing Director Tamara Beauchamp (tbeaucha@uci.edu) are also available to help. Ultimately, our goal is for you to pursue a project that is both meaningful to you and feasible as an online research project. Your primary and secondary sources must be accessible for this project to work, so you may find that you need to adapt along the way. Try to be open in this process while also recognizing that your seminar instructors will be guiding you in a modality that may be unfamiliar to them. We thank you in advance for your patience and flexibility.

Your writing grade in Humanities Core this quarter will be allocated as follows:

Research Project Components	Writing Grade Allocation
Prewriting Assignments	25%
Website: Research Blog (4 posts) and Multimodal Presentation of Your Research	25%
Final Research Paper	40%
Participation	10%

 

 

 

Posted 22 March 2020