Research Exercise #3

Purpose: This exercise helps you to: 1)  identify the social location of your proposed research project 2) shift to a text centered project in which complementary methods focus explicitly on your corpus; 3) begin developing a bibliography from which to draw inspiration for your research question/hypothesis. 

Assignment: Submit a 1 - 2 page single space written report that includes the following sections:

Social Location

This section should include discussion of the specific texts that comprise your working corpus along with consideration of the social location of the texts. Your corpus should include texts in the narrow sense and may include texts in the wider sense. Your discussion of social location should consider the most narrowly conceived way of defining the social category(ies) that are most pertinent to your interests.

Text Centered Research Questions

In three respective paragraphs, experiment with three versions of a research question/hypothesis in which your corpus is one element. Each version should frame the question/hypothesis in terms of some specific relationship between the texts/corpus and some  other element being explored. Each version should specify the social location of the project in the narrowest possible domain. 

Working Bibliography

Locate one scholarly source from sociology or anthropology that might help frame your questions/hypothesis/argument. This source may operate as argument or theory in the BEAM typology.  You are encouraged to draw this source from  previous or current SOAN courses, including this one. The source may focus on some combination of: the kinds of texts in which you are interested; the kinds of relationships in which you are interested; the social location in which you are interested. Write one paragraph that includes a “they say...I ask/hypothesize” move that links the source with your proposed research question/hypothesis. Include a bibliographic citation of the source.