Much of the work involved in exploring the material covered by this course is expected to take place during the seminars.This is where you will have the opportunity to discuss the ideas raised by the course material, films and readings.They allow the chance to express your own opinions and either confirm or challenge the main ideas of the material at hand.

Each week, all students should have read the required readings and be ready to discuss them.The readings are gathered from a wide range of disciplinary approaches - if you have any difficulty understanding these basic materials please let the course convenor know so they can be discussed in greater detail.These articles must be read carefully and it is expected that you will reflect a sound understanding of these approaches in the written work you submit.

1. Preparation - Weekly “Discussion Preparation Guide” (10%)

Seminar preparation involves a couple of hours of reading each week. To facilitate tutorial discussion, you are required to submit a short summary and analysis of each of that week’s readings (you often have to do two of them per week).

Brief Description: Each week, you must fill out a Discussion Preparation Guide and bring it to class.  This will help prepare you to participate in seminar discussions.

Details: A sample Discussion Preparation Guide (DPG) is found at the end of this Unit Outline and is also available on iLearn. As convenor, I’ll hand out a guide in the first week of class, and after that, you should print and fill one out each week.  You will bring this to class and use it to inform class discussions.  When you first come to class, you should show it to me so that I can see if it’s been completed.  You can use it to take additional notes during the seminar discussion.  At the end of the day, you will hand in your DPG to the unit convenor.  They will be returned the following week in class.

The point of the DPG is not for me to check if you are getting the "right" answer. Rather, they are valuable tools in generating discussion so that together, as a tutorial group, we can work out what we think about the readings.

These little summaries also act as catalogues and mnemonic devices for students to organise all the information you acquire when you do readings for the course. You do not need to write reams and reams of summaries, but as long as you have a quick way of accessing the core content of each reading, you can always go to the original document if you want to look into it in more detail.

At the end of the course (because you have a heap of catalogued summaries) you can use these in your essays, including in other courses. With the focus more on analytical thinking, these little catalogues will help students move away from writing huge summary sections in their essays and to start dealing with information more thematically.

1. Participation – Weekly discussion (10%)

Each student should fully participate in class discussions and will take turns leading a discussion of the week’s readings.

To generate discussion in class: students will spend 10 minutes at the beginning of each class just talking about their DPGs with each other. This will hopefully help to wake you up, it breaks the ice, gets your mouths working and also gives you a little more confidence to talk in class with the other students so that you can maximize your tute participation marks. The point of the DPGs is that you also have a clear and concise bit of info that you can refer to in the class.

All students are expected to actively participate in class discussion.  Your ability to do good social research (among living human beings!!) requires you to be able to actively engage in and lead discussions in a social setting. As such, each student will be expected to facilitate and participate in discussion from week to week.

Your research projects will also be incorporated into ongoing class discussion. Every week we’ll have a quick debriefing where you will report on the progress of your research project and talk through any interesting findings, difficulties, or successes you’re encountering. We will all learn from watching each other muddle through an ethnographic research project, from the planning to the implementation to writing up.

In your verbal contributions to class discussions, what I will be looking for is remarks that engage thoughtfully with the readings and with the theoretical issues raised by the methods you are trialling in your ongoing research projects.  It is also important that you engage respectfully with your peers.  Do not mock anyone’s contributions in seminar.  If you don’t understand or agree with something someone says, ask them to clarify, or explain respectfully why you disagree.  Everyone should feel free to speak up in class.  Please do not drown out quieter voices, interrupt, or otherwise dominate seminar discussion. 

If you are having trouble speaking up in class discussion, please come to speak with the unit convenor privately and together we can strategise ways to facilitate your contribution to the seminars.

Guidelines for discussion participation:

The kinds of contributions that are valued in seminar participation include:

• Initiating discussion
• Giving information
• Asking for information
• Raising questions
• Giving a restatement of another’s contribution
• Asking for clarification
• Giving examples
• Encouraging others
• Relieving group tension

You will lose participation marks for:

• Expression of unsupported opinions.  (Essentially, this means don’t talk about things you don’t know about – in particular, if you haven’t done the readings, don’t try to make up for this by pretending you have or making stuff up.  You’ll just lose points for this.)
• Taking discussion off the topic of the readings and the issues they raise.
• Attempts to dominate discussion.  (If you find yourself talking more than others in the group, please hold back so others have the chance to join in the discussion.)
• Interrupting others who are speaking.
• Mockery of others.

Throughout discussion, students should jot down in their discussion guide ideas that were mentioned by others and struck them as useful.

It is a requirement of this course that you complete an online training module on Human Research Ethics.

http://www.mq.edu.au/ethics_training

***The online ethics module should be done as homework for week three.  Upon completion of the quiz, print the certificate of completion and bring to class.  The module takes about 3-4 hours to complete.  Warning: start the quiz well in advance because if you fail any section of the quiz, it will not allow you to proceed to the next section of the quiz until 24 hours have passed, so it’s not a good thing to do at the last minute.

NB You must pass the ethics quiz before you can begin your research

You will spend some time observing people at a busy public location that is convenient to you. For example, if you were at Uni, you could go to: (1) outside the entrance to the library, (2) Marxine’s, (3) the U@MQ cafeteria, (4) outside of a bus stop on campus, or (5) at one of the major cross-walks on campus(Anywhere really, as long as it’s a spot where there’s social activity with people moving about.)

You should spend 1 hour observing the movement of people through this space.  Take notes and log activities in your journal.  These notes should be detailed, but you will have to decide what details to pay attention to.

For example, if you are observing the library, you might note how many people go in and how many people come out during that hour.  Do they walk immediately out and leave the area?  Or do they come out and socialize in the immediate area around the library entrance?  How many come out to smoke, and how many smoke before entering? 

Or, if you are observing at a café, you might do a time allocation analysis (see Gross reading), paying close attention to how much time café patrons spend on each activity: how much time do they spend in line?  Mixing their coffee?  Sitting and drinking?  Smoking?  Talking with friends?  Do people who are alone drink or stir their coffee faster or slower than people who are sitting in groups?  Etc.  Or you might decide to focus on the activities of the people who work in the café.  Or you might focus specifically on patron-employee interactions as they order and pay for their drinks.  For example, how many people count their change after they pay for their drink?  If you’re close enough to hear the interactions, you might note how many people say “thank you” or “ta” (etc) for their drinks.  Etc.

As I said, take careful notes.  You should also want to sketch out a map of the social space and how people use it.  You can work with other students to divide the workload and see if this makes a difference to your findings. You may each choose to observe and record different things, or you may all decide to observe the same thing but from different angles.  Maybe you will have certain designated observers and certain scribes and yet a separate designated map-maker.

Note: This is NOT an interactional exercise.  Do not talk with or interview people.  Also, your notes should not focus on any individual person – rather, you should focus on the broader movements of people through space and aggregate social patterns that can be observed.  This is about observing unobtrusively.  Consider: is that even possible?  As you watch people and take notes, does anybody notice you doing so?  Does anybody ask what you are doing there?  What steps do you need to take to be unobtrusive?  What are the ethical and methodological challenges in trying to be unobtrusive but not covert in your observations? 

If you are observing public behaviour in public spaces but not actually talking to people, then ethical research practice does not require that you ask each person for permission to observe him or her, but it is essential that you observe in a non-obtrusive way and use no recording devices.  You should try to blend into the background.  Don’t go around peering over people’s shoulders to see what they’re eating, or otherwise violating the norms of regular social behaviour in that public space.   If anyone does ask what you are doing, be prepared to explain to them that you are conducting an observational exercise for class, that it is being done completely anonymously and confidentially – i.e. no individual will be identified through the exercise – and that no data will be published.

When you come to class, you will discuss your findings in groups and then have 5-7 minutes to describe what you observed and reflect on methodological issues / problems that arose during the exercise.

Research proposals will be original project designs for ethnographic research projects.  Your research proposal should be a formal description of the ongoing project of ethnographic description that you are engaged in for this class. 

Undertake a literary search for your chosen topic. Identify a minimum of 6-8 academic texts of high quality, which all cover relevant aspects of the topic (the texts should be suitable for comparison).

Websites that are not explicitly part of the social science discourse do not count as references. Wikipedia is NOT an appropriate source and may not be used!

The proposal should include the following sections:

Proposal title: provide a short descriptive title of no more than 20 words.

Abstract: This should be a short summary of the project, maximum 100 words.

Background: Discusses the academic literature to set up the research question.  What other researchers have tackled this issue?  What have they said about the topic?  What are the points of difference between theorists? How is your project similar to, or different from, those of other researchers?

Aims: What will this research concretely demonstrate or accomplish?

Methods: This should include a detailed discussion of research methods, rationales for choice of methods, background readings on the research questions as they are relevant to methodology and analysis.

Proposed timeline: What is you plan for completion? Please carefully consider your timeline for fieldwork so that you can submit your ethnographic journal by 11 April and research paper by 15 June.

Ethics: How does your project comply with human research ethics principles? Include a short note to demonstrate how you have thought about the ethical dimensions of your research project. Please note that your ethnographic fieldwork is limited to unobtrusive observation, informal conversations and phenomenological self-reflection.

Significance: What is the significance of this project?  What new insight will it shed on the research question?

References: Please look up the essay writing guidelines on the Anthropology homepage for citation and referencing guidelines (you should use in-text citations and Harvard-style referencing).

Make sure all pages are numbered, your student ID number and a word count appears on your proposal.

Please submit an electronic copy of the paper to the turnitin box in iLearn.

Make sure all pages are numbered, your student ID number and a word count appears on your paper. Bring 2 hard (paper) copies of your research proposal to the seminar, so that your research proposals can be peer-evaluated, AND submit an electronic copy of the paper to the turnitin box in iLearn.

IMPORTANT

Write your student number into the header of the pages. Do NOT mention your name in the header. Your name should appear ONLY on the assignment cover page. It is crucial for this exercise that peer-reviewing is anonymous.

Write, write, write, write, write! 

Students will engage in a small-scale ethnographic research project over the course of the semester. Each student will keep a ‘field journal’ that documents your own life ethnographically in a series of dated fieldnotes. You should collate completed writing assignments, including observational logs, research diary entries, sketches, diagrams, and other useful data related to the on-going project. 

You should begin this journal from week 2.

You are encouraged to treat the journal as a ‘field diary,’ and to write in it as often as possible (a minimum of twice a week).

Even before you have a research project, you should start writing your decision making process in the journal. The key is to get you into the habit of writing journal entries and field notes and to connect you with the reflexive process of fieldwork.

I will consult the field journal on one occasion to check on progress. Because there are 12 weeks between week 2 and when the journals are due for marking, I will expect a minimum of 24 entries to pass.

Details:

Obviously, you can’t document your entire life in a journal, or you’d be writing all day.  You will be picking a narrow area of your daily experience to focus on.  Will it be your school life and encounters with other students?  Encounters with teaching staff and uni bureaucracy?  Will it be your work life?  Will you document your personal grooming practices and aesthetic choices – how you dress, shop, style your hair, wear makeup?  Will you document your experiences on public transportation?  Will you document a particular sport or hobby – surfing, cricket, Second Life, World of Warcraft, canyoneering, hiking, snake wrangling?  (I’m not encouraging snake wrangling, by the way.) 

This should be a participant-observation record of your own experiences, but you should also document the advantages and disadvantages posed by the key method you’ll be using: what can participant observation tell you that you can’t discover from a quantitative survey?  What can a quantitative survey or a formal interview tell you that you wouldn’t find out through participant observation?  You may also collect and index materials related to your project (texts, music, video, pop culture ephemera, etc).  The research journal may be digital or paper in format, or both (if digital, please include materials on a CD and submit along with any paper materials in one folder).  These fieldnotes will form the basis of your research paper and “mini-ethnography”.

From the beginning of this project, you will be expected to adhere to the highest ethical standards of research, data collection, and data storage. 

Please see “Human Research Ethics Considerations for Student Projects” protocol at the end of this unit outline for more detailed guidelines on how to ethically approach this process of writing about your everyday interactions with others, and give everyone you wish to write about an information sheet (also at the end of this unit outline).

You will be assessed based on both frequency of journal entries (*you should make journal entries at least twice weekly) and the thoughtfulness with which you analyse the experiences documented.  Several entries will be selected randomly to assess the journal, but the entire journal will not be read by the course convenor.  If there’s are any particular entries that you do not want me to read, please mark this by noting “private” at the top of the entry next to the date, and I will not read it.  You will receive a grade with a brief assessment of the overall journal, but you will not be assessed on any particulars of the journal assignment (i.e. I will not be making notes in the margins!), because this project is primarily about writing for yourself, not about writing for the course convenor.

All of your journal materials should be placed in a sealed envelope (so that only the convenor will read them) and submitted in class on the due date. If you have kept a digital journal, you can copy it onto a flash drive and submit that.  Your journals will be returned to you in seminar the following week.

The peer review serves as feedback to students about their research projects. Students are asked to critically comment on the quality of the text and make suggestions for improvement/future directions.

The idea of the peer review is to help you to:

• Engage with the work of others and learn to give constructive feedback.
• Internalise marking criteria by applying them.

Bring a print out of your peer reviews to class. Submit them together with the hard copy of the proposals you had to review AND submit an electronic copy of the review to the turnitin box in iLearn.

Each student will read 2 other research proposals, randomly distributed.  After the break, students will return their comments in class to the convenor, who will provide a grade.

Comments on your peers’ research proposals should focus on:

• Does the abstract do a good job of summarising the project?
• Does the background section show how the research project relates to an academic body of literature and what makes it distinctive compared to other researchers’ approaches to similar problems?  Can you think of any theorists that might be relevant to the project that haven’t been included?
• Are the aims clear?
• Does the methods section seem like it offers the best methodological solution for addressing the project aims?
• Is the significance of the research project clear?
• Is the research proposal well-written, clear and understandable for someone who doesn’t specialise in this area of knowledge?
• Is the writing concise?  Does it make the most of every one of those thousand words, or is there “fluff” that could be pared down?
• Are the references done correctly?

Try to give constructive criticism: don’t just tell them what you think is wrong, but also what they could do to fix it, and be sure to provide positive feedback, too

It should describe the goals of the project, the methods employed, and what you discovered during the course of your research.

Start early!

Select a topic that interests you (we will discuss the appropriateness of your projects throughout the course). Narrow it down so that it is suitable for a scholarly interrogation. Keep in mind that most students try too much in their research.

Undertake a literary search for your chosen topic. Identify a minimum of 15 academic texts of high quality, from the social sciences and/or humanities (books, journal articles – the texts should be suitable for comparison).

Websites that are not explicitly part of the social science discourse do not count as references. Wikipedia is NOT an appropriate source and may not be used!

Your paper must present your research in a way that maintains academic integrity whilst also engaging the reader with your ethnographic material. You must connect your material to larger processes, using sound theoretical foundations and consistent and measured analysis. However, there is no self evident logical progression between method and writing. The ethnographer’s theoretical approach and stylistic writing decisions radically shape the presentation of ethnographic data.

During seminars, we will be discussing various stylistic choices in writing ethnography.  How do they describe and analyse?  How is description linked with method?  What are the rhetorical techniques that they use to persuade the reader of the validity of their analysis or method?  What political and ethical positions lie behind the writing decisions they make?

The paper should include the following information:

• A strategic sample of your primary ethnographic material, thoughtfully extracted from your fieldnotes to draw out the key insights of your ethnography.
• A discussion of the academic literature relating to your research question and findings. (What other researchers have tackled this issue?  What have they said about the topic?  What are the points of difference between theorists? How is your project similar to, or different from, those of other researchers?)
• You should use 15 to 20 academic references from the social sciences and/or humanities (books, journal articles). Websites that are not explicitly part of the social science discourse do not count as references. Wikipedia is NOT an appropriate source and may not be used!
• A detailed discussions of research methods, rationales for choice of methods, background readings on the research questions as they are relevant to methodology. 
• What did you discover?
• What is the significance of this project?  What new insight will it shed on the research question?
• Format: For all assignments, please see the writing guidelines on the Anthropology homepage for citation and referencing guidelines (you should use in-text citations and Harvard-style referencing).

When you are writing your paper, make sure the text engages with theory, theoretical concepts and demonstrates their application.

It is not enough to simply make declarative statements. You must present EVIDENCE from your own empirical research and from academic literature. An author must always keep in mind that he/she has to convince the reader of his/her point of view: argue, show and prove.

Critically interrogate your assumptions. How did you arrive at them? Could there be other positions? Actively search other positions? Explain the different arguments and compare them. What do you conclude from the comparison?

You will get feedback on the quality of your paper. You will use this feedback to reflect on and then develop your revised submission.

20% of your final grade will be based on this research paper. DO NOT TREAT THIS AS A DRAFT PAPER!!!

For class, we will be reading excerpts from a range of different ethnographies (both old and new). During seminars, we will be discussing these authors’ stylistic choices in writing ethnography.  How do they describe and analyse?  How is description linked with method?  What are the rhetorical techniques that they use to persuade the reader of the validity of their analysis or method?  What political and ethical positions lie behind the writing decisions they make?  Your assignment in this mini-ethnography is to pick one of these authors and write your mini-ethnography in their style.  (Alternatively, you may imitate the style of another ethnographer we haven’t read in class, but discuss this with me first.) 

What this entails, first and foremost, is carefully analysing their writing techniques.  Will you write a detached yet sympathetic account of belief and practice like Evans-Pritchard, using the language of scientific rigour and generalisations (e.g. “the Azande believe this...”)?  Will you write an etic account of your own life as Horace Miner did for the Nacirema?  Will you write ethnographic fiction like Wolf?  Will you write in the literary style of an analytical memoir like journalist Julian Dibbell?  Will you write a humanistic account that emically portrays the emotional worlds and individual idiosyncrasies behind cultural rules and norms like Abu-Lughod? 

When you write your paper, will need to make some hard decisions about how you present your research in your final essay. Below are some guidelines that may be helpful.