Researching Disability
As should be clear after our explorations of disability in relation to language and space, disability is truly all around us all the time. But in order to truly hammer home that point and also to give each of you an opportunity to explore how disability might relate to your particular own areas of interest, in the final unit in the course you will each be responsible for developing a researched argument about some topic that relates to disability in one of your areas of interest (defined by a profession/academic field) that might take the form of either a conventional white paper or a website (either way it needs to be 1500-1750 words and will be posted on your site, so the issue is rather one of form). Like the other assignment sequences, this unit will be composed of multiple parts that lead up to the production of this researched document. Thus you will first work through the process of research itself by investigating the perspectives each of you want to approach issues of disability through (3.1) and then clarifying the specific subjects we’d like to approach from those perspectives (3.2).
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Following those decisions (which you will inevitably refine and/or revise during the course of your research), you will begin compiling bibliographies of previous research on/in relation to our chosen subjects and critically evaluate those sources (3.3) and attempt to elucidate the ways those individual sources fit together in a larger conversation (3.4). At the same time, each of you will develop our knowledge of the characteristic features unique to each of the professional/academic discourses you are exploring, knowledge that you will then need to employ when constructing our own researched arguments in order to make them intelligible in the context of those pre-existing conversations (3.5). Then, each of you will compose a researched argument of 1500-1750 words (3.6), which will importantly not only respond to the pre-existing conversations on our subjects of interest, but will make some sort of contribution to them, however modest. Finally, using your research each of you will create a digital artifact that concisely delivers some part of your research/argument not to a professional/academic audience, but to a general public one (might be a meme, Public Service Announcement, skit, infographic, etc.) and provide an explanation of the choices you made in composing this publicly accessible intervention (3.7).
Assignment Sequence Breakdown and Due Dates:
Researching Disability
(15%) Annotated bibliography
(15%) Literature Review
(60%) 1500-1750 word Research Project + 250 word self-assessment
(10%) Creative project based on your research + in-class presentation
(15%) Annotated bibliography
(15%) Literature Review
(60%) 1500-1750 word Research Project + 250 word self-assessment
(10%) Creative project based on your research + in-class presentation
3.1 Investigating Your Professional Perspective (250-500 words) (LS) [due Oct. 28]
Chose a Professional Identity. The identity you choose will serve as a key part of your final individualized research project determining the approach you take towards your subject and the primary audience that your research will speak to a. This is a great opportunity to begin exploring your actual professional, academic and/or personal aspirations, so choose a professional identity carefully and remember you will be spending quite a bit of time on this project so it might as well be something you really are interested in.
Once you have chosen your identity, write a 250-500-word blog post reflecting on the nature of that profession and your interest in it and how disability might relate to it. Some questions you might consider include: what does this professional identity involve? What kind of work would you be doing? What audiences might you be regularly speaking with from such a position? What communities and constituencies would you be involved with through such a position and relatedly who would your work be affecting? Once you have established some sense of what this professional identity entails you want to consider how disability might relate to it. This consideration can take a wide variety of forms, from meditating on the possible inclusion of people with disabilities into the profession to suggesting how members of this profession might encounter disability. The point is not to come up with one definitive way, but rather to think about the diversity of ways disability might relate to this profession.
3.2 Project Proposal (250 words) (LS) [due Nov. 4]
In a 250 word blog post I'd like you to establish the specific subject--that is somehow related to disability and in some relation to the American context-- that you want to explore from your previously chosen professional/academic perspective in your final research project. Give your reader a sense not only of the subject itself but also of your initial thoughts about where you might go in your research on this subject (though obviously your direction might change considerably through the research project) and also some sense of why you are interested in this subject.
3.3 Annotated Bibliography [due Nov. 13]
Compose an annotated bibliography comprised of 5-7 secondary sources related to your research topic and publish it to your personal web site as a sub-page to a main "Researching Disability" page. Each annotation should be 75-150 words long and should briefly summarize the main argument of the source before providing some general evaluation of the source and notation of its utility for your particular project.
3.4 Literature Review [due Nov. 22]
Compose a 500 word literature review of 8-10 secondary sources that synthesizes the summary and evaluation of those research sources that you began in your annotated bibliography and publish it to your personal web site as yet another sub-page to your main "Researching Disability" page. Unlike the annotated bibliography, this literature review should not deal with these sources individually in an alphabetically ordered list, but rather offer some sense of how these various sources speak with or to each other and what the shape/trend of the larger conversations in your area of research is in the form of an essay. Some questions to try and answer in this literature review include the following: What are the key questions and problems of your topic and what are these various sources saying about such questions/problems ? Moreover, what are the 'sides' of the argument/conversation being had among these sources around the questions/problems they seem to be responding to/attempting to answer? Finally, you want to conclude by suggesting where the silences are in this conversation that might serve as the necessary space for you to articulate your voice within.
3.5 Professional Research Document Assessment (250 words) (LS) [due Nov. 25]
When we make a contribution to a field, and thus enter that field’s conversation, it is important to do so in a way that is recognizable to other participants. What does that mean? Simply put, being "conventional." We often talk about conventionality as though it is a uniformly bad thing, but in order to understand one another in conversations (whether in everyday speech or in scholarship) it is crucial that we utilize conventions that all the participants in that conversation have agreed to use. In order to focus in on the specific conventions of the conversation each of you have chosen to enter, I would like you to write up a 250 word Low stakes blog past critically describing the characteristic stylistic features of a research document in your field of interest (you can either synthesize these insights from the variety of documents you have looked at for your Literature Review OR focus in on one document that seems particularly exemplary). The key for this post is to isolate the features that seem to be conventional so you know what your own contribution to this conversation should look/sound like. Some specific things to look for include, but are not limited to: how the text addresses the reader, how the the text’s author if framed (1st person? Plural? Any reflection?); the citation style both in the text itself and after the text (as well as other related extra-textual features like footnotes/endnotes); the language being used, the type of evidence/research being used, the structure of the document (sections, etc.). In the end, this assignment is not meant to be comprehensive but rather to get you starting to explicitly think about the stylistic features that you will need to adopt for your own final research paper.
3.6 Final Research Project (1500-1750 word white paper OR multimodal webtext) + 150-250 word self-assessment [due Dec. 17]
While the form of this final project is up to you (it might be either a white paper research essay OR a multimodal website), nonetheless, you will need to produce a 1500-1750 word (6-7 double-spaced spaces) researched argument (citing 8-10 sources) on some subject related to disability and the American context in your respective field of interest that utilizes the characteristic stylistic features of research in that field (citation style, argument style, voice, etc.). The key to this assignment is that you ultimately both 1) engage with the pre-existing discourse about/that might relate to your subject of interest in your field and 2) make some kind of argument that contributes to and not merely reviews this pre-existing discourse. Since each of you will be researching in different fields, what such a contribution will look like will vary considerably. For some of you, this might entail providing a new interpretation of pre-existing material/data, gathering new material/data and providing some initial analysis of it, proposing (with some specificity) an experiment to gather new data, or even proposing how and why one discourse might benefit from a new kind of analysis (perhaps from another field). Regardless of the field and correspondent type of contribution, however, given the time and length restraints of this assignment, it is important to recognize that for the purposes of this project merely proposing (without actually performing) a study will count as a very valuable contribution, though in doing so you will need to quite specifically argue what such a study should look like and why, as well as why such a study is necessary/important to undertake (particularly in relation to the pre-existing conversations in the field).
3.7 Creative Intervention + 5-7 minute presentation [due Dec. 17]
I would like you to present some insight from your final research project in a digitally mediated form that is explicitly composed for consumption by the general public (even a form that can go viral) in order to think about both the creative and public interventions we can and arguably need to make based on the research that we are privileged to be able to perform in the academy. As noted above, this intervention can take a wide variety of forms (memes, skits, PSA's, infographics, etc.) but regardless of form needs to make an argument/present information in a way that is accessible to the widest possible public audience (think of your friends, family, and schoolmates, among others, as well as perhaps people with various kinds of disabilities) and which should be based on the research that you have done for Assignment 3.6. Since this will be a digital artifact, you might also think of this as not only an intervention of its own in the public sphere, but also as an advertisement for your larger research project and thus might want to embed some sort of link to your site/project in the artifact. In addition to the artifact itself, you will need to make a 5-7 minute presentation detailing the rhetorical choices you made in its construction (from the form you chose to use to the part of your researched argument you focused on and the specific small-scale decisions and choices you made throughout the process of actually producing the artifact) during the final exam period scheduled for our class on December 17, 8:00-10:30 am.