2021-2022 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 Animals, People, and Power. 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 process, you will produce a series of prewriting and reflective components, including Research Blog Posts added to the website you have been building. The required process-oriented assignments will be determined by your seminar instructor and must be completed in the order assigned. As a culminating component of your website before submission of your Research Paper, you will share your research discoveries in a digital Multimodal Research Presentation on your website. Your final Research Paper must incorporate and engage in depth with at least 6 scholarly, peer-reviewed articles or books and should be 10–12 pages (approximately 3500–4000 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 finding
• Demonstrate flexible strategies for generating, revising, editing, and proofreading drafts while also actively reflecting on the process of writing and research
• Reflect critically on the experience of research, writing and multimodal communication

Required Reading

You may find it worthwhile to revisit the chapters you read in the Humanities Core Handbook during the fall and winter quarters as you conduct research and draft your paper. In addition, you will read the following this quarter:

• Beauchamp, Tamara. “Determining the Topic of a Humanistic Research Project.” Humanities Core Handbook, XanEdu, 2021, pp. 221–29.
• Morse, Susan. “Developing Academic Titles, Introductions, and Conclusions.” Humanities Core Handbook, XanEdu, 2021, pp. 230–44.

The Writing Process

As you can likely tell from the Learning Goals detailed above, the spring Research Project is an integrative and cumulative 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, historical, and cultural studies analysis that you have developed in the past two quarters—as well as those you will learn this spring in film and media studies and philosophy—and apply them to a topic that interests and excites you. We invite you to take an expansive view of what “the animal” in Animals, People, and Power 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 merpeople and 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 assignments you will undertake in this process 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 writing assignment—as well as your final research paper—is an academic one. You should envision yourself addressing lecturing faculty members, your seminar instructor, and your peers, in as much as they are also immersed in the humanistic study of Animals, People, and Power 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 identify 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.

Many students find that the work they do in the spring quarter of Humanities Core inspires them to take additional coursework in a Humanities department. Humanities Core Research Projects have formed the foundation of many undergraduate honors theses. Past students have even reported that this project sparked their interest toward future graduate study. You can read award-winning examples from past cycles of Humanities Core on our Student Awards page; be aware, however, that some past students were writing about a different theme than Animals, People, and Power and/or may have had different technical expectations in place for their projects because of the pandemic. The winners of last year’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program Awards will share their insights on this process with you at our Annual UROP Symposium on April 22 (please see the Calendar page on the Canvas Lecture site for more information).

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

Research Project Components	Writing Grade Allocation
Process Writing Assignments (including Research Blog Posts)	35%
Multimodal Research Presentation on Website	15%
Final Research Paper	40%
Participation	10%

 

 

 

Posted 22 February 2022