Sociological Theory: Final Writing Assignment Guidelines
Topic:
This paper should be about college life, very broadly defined. Here are some potential topics to start:
Why go to these places and spend money along with years of your life to do it?
What is it like moving from High School settings (both home and educational) to College ones?
What, exactly, is UP with (take your pick) the classes, the parties, the clubs, the cliques, the sports, the sex, the opportunity, the necessity, the cost, the fashion, the professors, or the red tape and the institutionality of it all??????
College life is very novel to students…but is also ‘traditional’ in many ways. What’s “new” about it? What’s OLD? How, in other words, is it an expression of Modernity?
How has College Life changed in the year 2020?
……Not an exhaustive list. Feel free to be more creative than this.
Theoretical Approach:
Like your mid-term assignment, this one is theoretically comparative. Choose two theories to analyze here. One of these theories must be from the second half of class (all units after the film). You can choose two from the second half of class if you wish.
Things to Remember:
The theoretical assumptions of each paradigm as you think about your topic.
Very broadly speaking, this class is divided into two theoretical units (the modern and the after-modern…the “Post” prefix is too loaded a term to use here.) What are the basic differences between these two outlooks? Indigenous theory, for example, would help answer this question. Each overall perspective is important, but in this work you should be able to communicate basic differences between them (by the way I’ll use these guidelines as a basis for a review podcast). This will be the case even if you choose two theories from the after-modern era, as you will need to make a case for why these theories are a good fit for analyzing your topic.
On that note, theoretically speaking, you can analyze ANY social phenomena from ANY theoretical perspective, but some topics have a better ‘fit’ with certain theoretical perspectives than others. For example, you can talk about internal politics in the modern office setting from an Indigenous theoretical perspective, but you might get more traction if you went with Foucault or Weber instead (because they talk about this a little more directly than, say, Linda Smith).
By using a comparative approach, I do not mean that you need to ‘pit’ theories ‘against each other’. You can certainly do this if you wish, but in my experience theory works better if you take a collaborative, rather than oppositional approach to comparing them. Why?
Because any phenomena you decide to discuss can be analyzed from multiple perspectives, but no single perspective can give us a complete picture of any single phenomena. Each perspective, in other words, has blind spots. We use multiple perspectives, therefore, to reduce the overall amount of blind spots in our analysis.
Format:
1600 words max. 1200 minimum. You will need to be very judicious with your words.
No need to provide citations, UNLESS:
You Quote an author from class (something I recommend and I would just need the page number from the reading).
Or
You Directly Discuss a source outside of class material (like a news article or journal article or book). This is not a research paper and you are not required to consult outside sources, but if you do, I want to know that they are.
I do not want you reading a lot of outside material for this paper. If you read something, go back and read the theory again.
Be up-front with the aspect of college life you are discussing AND with theories you will be utilizing. Make this VERY clear. It might actually be a good idea to start your paper with the sentence: This paper discusses (insert aspect of college life here) and will use (insert theory A) and (insert theory B) to do this. This doesn’t make for the best writing, but it will be easier for you to start like this. Remember to stay on task, in that sense.
Final Guideline: Don’t make this too hard.
Choose something you’re passionate about to write about. Or choose something you think you could discuss easily while blindfolded with your hands tied behind your back, metaphorically speaking. As long as you directly engage with theories discussed in class throughout the course of your paper, you will be fine. I think you will find space to be a premium as you come to your conclusion. If that is the case, stick to the main points, stick to what matters…for you. This paper is a demonstration of what you’ve learned in this class, and how you are able to apply this knowledge to your interpretations of social phenomena.