cinematography

Date

Wednesday - Friday 21 - 23 October 2020
Expired!

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RPA

Research Proposal Assignment 4 Due date: 23 October

Submit RPA4 to the appropriate “Soup Group” googledoc folder before 23:59!

Open the linked folder. Access requires that you sign in to Google Drive.

Koen’s Soup Group

Mark’s Soup Group

Metje’s Soup Group

Sander’s Soup Group

Copy the template document (right-click for the option to ‘Make a copy’). Please do not overwrite the template file.

Operationalizing Research Questions

(800-1000 words)

  • Part 1 (100 words): Your assignment should begin by describing your research as a detailed case study that specifies in concrete terms where will you be doing your research and with whom. Your task is to be factually descriptive of the context.
  • Part 2 (100 words): Next explain why you want to do this research, what is motivating you, and what you want to demonstrate with your research. With your concepts in mind and their relationship to anthropological debates in the literature, how will you operationalize your research so that it can contribute to anthropological knowledge?
  • Part 3 (200 words): Elaborate what makes your chosen case simultaneously unique and generalizable. In other words, your research should be able to produce:
    1. detailed knowledge that provides insights about something not well understood (e.g., the role of transnational activists in the movement of refugees; the politics of historical commemoration in contemporary South Africa; the production of national identity in Aruba’s Grand Carnival Parade; ‘natural hair and beauty’ politics among hairdressers in Accra; everyday strategies domestic laborers use to cope with social crisis; the usage and experience of hormonal contraception; public and private boundaries around female masturbation; etc.), and
    2. generalizable knowledge that provides representative examples about something of greater interest and importance (e.g., national borders, religious diversity, ecological sustainability, protest politics, gender relations, decolonization politics, beauty standards, female sexuality, medical dependency, economic decline, migration policies, etc.)
  • Part 4 (50-100 words): Taking your answers to the above prompts, reformulate your research question by answering the following questions and then convert these into a single question as demonstrated:
    • What do you want to learn about? (Description of a unique situation)
    • Why do you want to learn about it? (Analytical conceptualization)
    • Why is this important? (Research relevance / key concepts)For example:
    1. I’m trying to learn about: the social world of alternative media production in Beirut
    2. Because I want to understand how: contemporary Arab image-makers grapple with national histories of violence …
    3. This will help me contribute insights about: the way experimental visual approaches mediate the experience of postwar subjectivity, critique (neo-) orientalist representations, and activate intersections of public participation.Becomes:
    • My research explores the social world of alternative media production in Beirut, because I want to understand how contemporary Arab image-makers grapple with national histories of violence in order to address the way experimental visual approaches mediate the experience of postwar subjectivity, critique (neo-)orientalist representations, and activate intersections of public participation.Other examples:
    • This research explores the political intervention of congregants of Kasr al-Dubara Evangelical Church since January 2011, because I want to understand how rhetoric and power mobilized religious subjectivities in Kasr al-Dubara Church toward new political projects and activisms. This study will analyze how Evangelical Egyptians, as members of a precariously situated religious minority, are negotiating their own histories and the current political arena in order to carve out a space in the public debates over citizenship, good governance, and belonging.
    • My research will use visual ethnographic methods to examine the primary school curriculum reform in Timor-Leste, because I want to comprehend how different visions of education, working environments, and communications media and practices shape education policy. This study seeks to contribute to current debates and ethnographic knowledge about how global education policies are re-contextualized in diverse localities and in the various layers of the policy–to–practice process, including international development organizations, government, the reform project, and schools.
  • Part 5 Draft 4-6 sub-questions that are clearly motivated by your research, but break the main question into smaller parts. The sub-questions are not additional questions, but rather the concretization of the main research question. These are the things you need to know in order to answer your research question. For each sub-question, indicate whether it is descriptive (who, what, where) or analytic (how, why). In other words, is it aimed at describing/establishing what is happening in the field or at explaining/interpreting what is happening in the field. Lastly, indicate if the sub-question will be answered through film, text, or a combination.
    • For example, “What are the various institutional structures that shape women’s experience with hormonal contraception?” is a descriptive question, versus “How do these structures influence women’s experience with hormonal contraceptives?,” which is an analytical question.