English 202 Spring 2004 - Research Writing |
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The "Everyday" as a Theme The handful of readings and documentary films we will consider together this semester will serve several purposes. You will learn something about the working lives of maids, waitresses, and Wal-Mart clerks from Barbara Ehrenreich. With Eric Schlosser, you'll explore the history and consequences of the rise of Fast Food. Along with Michael Moore, you'll tour schools and ponder gun violence. As models of investigation, discovery, and reporting, they will help us think about gathering, assimilating and presenting ideas and information. They will also help to establish a "zone of interest" and basic vocabulary for our class discussions and your individual research projects. Avoiding the usual "research topics" that send too many students first to Google and then WorldBook, we will start closer to home--scanning our daily lives for what at first seems too ordinary, normal, unproblematic to research. We'll think about the systems, routines, institutions, habits, and games that we play each day. Dorm life, intramural sports, text-messaging, deer season, summer jobs, rushing. Directly through fieldwork as well as traditional research, you will investigate the everyday. |
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