| Progress report for week 2 | |
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BEFORE CLASS Today you will each present a short report distilling one of your peers’ J400 research papers for everyone’s benefit. In three-ish minutes, you should cover the following: • the heart of their topic — i.e., the historical question/problem • the main approach to history — e.g., political/economic/social/cultural/top-down/bottom-up/gendered/etc. — and why that approach was chosen to solve the historical problem • the key methodology (e.g., main primary sources (if identified)) • the central historical argument about change versus continuity over time • the significance of the subject and of the argument — i.e., why does this matter You will get to hear someone else distill your paper, as a measure of how close it came to your intended vision of your own paper. You will get to do the distilling, which is a skill worth practising and mastering. And you will get to hear about others’ research, to see what might inspire you on a technical level — i.e., not the content of a topic, but how the history was written. IN CLASS Here the prompts for our in-class writing today. 1. What is your main interest/passion in life? I.e., what can’t you stop noticing, thinking about, reading about, talking about, et cetera? 2. We wrote that, without anticipating this: How is your passion reflected, either directly or indirectly, in the research paper topic that you are considering for this semester? (My aim is that you work on something that you really care about. 3. How might someone else — who is interested in their own thing, not your thing — manage to see what's important and inspirational about your research topic? 4. How does your research topic address something that is currently missing from our historical knowledge? 5. How does your research topic question some aspect of life that is unquestioned? (I used the example of “the economy” — something we might imagine to be real, but which was invented in the 1940s, and which remains a discursive construct, not something that is actually real — and hence something that needed and needs to be questioned in fundamental ways.) 6. How might you refine your research topic now that you (may) have heard your own J400 paper distilled into its essence by someone else, now that you yourself have distilled someone else’s J400 paper, and now that you have heard all the J400 papers be distilled by someone? What techniques created a sense of importance and inspiration, making you want to know more, even about other people's research interests? What writing techniques created value and importance? 7. What happens to your research topic when you put it into an overly ambitious book title as follows: "[Topic] and the Making of the Modern World"? 8. Finally, who will be your faculty mentor who has expertise about your topic, and with whom you will be meeting three times this semester? |