Matters-Materials-Masculinities Research Dossier (20%)
Due at the end of Week 12 (starting 7 December, but hard deadline TBA).
Note: you are encouraged to adjust your sources and modify your focus based on feedback from proposal.
Building on your proposal, move forward with your research dossier. As an exercise, consider the dossier as a document that would provide an overview and a specific account of your object of analysis. It’s like a snapshot, synthesis, and starting point for the learning about the object of analysis.
If you have one chance to highlight and foreground core ideas, key concepts, and essential concerns regarding your topic and object of analysis, what would you include?
The dossier is judged on consistency and coherence, but the relevance, recency, and context of the sources you gather are important and bear on the assessment.
The dossier should include the following:
A 2.5-3.0 page double-spaced statement of intent (a short synthesis essay), which provides an overview and descriiption of the work you’ve done. Explain the stakes and importance of the project, summarize some of your findings, and persuasively describe how and why the specific focus is relevant to the course, to you, and to the world at large. (Tip: draft this at the outset, but complete at the end.)
A collection of 10 scholarly sources, which builds from the 6 sources you already have from the proposal. The additional 4 sources can be either scholarly or not, but they have to be relevant (news coverage, op-eds, cultural criticism, documentaries, podcast episode, etc.), You can include more than 10 sources. Organize the sources as a bibliography and format them correctly.
Annotations for each source. The annotations describe and situate the source, contextualize the research, and explain how and why it’s important for your work. So, in other words, the annotation is like an assessment of the source (not a literature review, but closer).
How you organize the annotations is up to you: alphabetical; thematic; academic and non-academic. Your work is being assessed on how you make sense of the sources to make apparent and clear the importance and implications of the research focus in the dossier (i.e., why do these issues and things matter?).
As a guide, annotations should be approx. 2 paragraphs (double spaced) and do the following:
Situate the source in a wider field of work.
Summarize the main arguments/ideas/concepts of the text/source in question.
Explain and connect the relevant ideas to the dossier project (i.e., why is this text/source essential.
You can also consider the following schemes to guide you: explanation/argument/summary; focus/evidence/summary; or summary/core ideas/connections.
Please avoid merely paraphrasing essay abstracts or introductions. Alert: I can tell when this is the case. The annotations should indicate some evidence of engagement with the texts/sources.
When I look at this assignment, I ask myself, “Could this dossier be the basis for a wider investigation or program of study? Does it provide insight about the core topic or object of analysis? Do I walk away with a good sense of why this issues, concern, object of inquiry, or topic is important to the course?”
