ANTH801

2008 Course Outline

Methodology in Local and Community Studies

A bread seller on the streets of downtown Cairo at night. Photo by L.L. Wynn 2008

MACQUARIE UNIVERSITY DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY

Copyright. This course outline and any appended material other than material already published or in the public domain remain copyright of the Anthropology Department, Macquarie University and cannot be reproduced in whole or in part without permission.

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Course convenor: Dr. Lisa Wynn office hours: Thursday 4-6pm and by appointment Office: C3A 611 lisa.wynn@mq.edu.au tel. (02) 9850-8095 fax (02) 9850-9391 COURSE OUTLINE What do anthropologists actually do and what is unique about anthropological research? Methodology in Local and Community Studies provides an introduction to ethnographic research in social and applied anthropology and is designed to give you an introduction to the tools of anthropological analysis in the context of first hand fieldwork experience. It is a hands-on unit where you will learn by doing your own fieldwork, discussing the issues raised in both the readings and your research, and learning from each others fieldwork as well. The course is geared around preparing you to be able to jump into research confidently and to be able to describe what anthropological methods are. Ethnographic research is comprised of three inter-related domains: creative theoretical speculation, methodological operationalization of theoretical questions, and concrete research practices. We explore the ethics of research and the politics of representation, kinds of observation, effective interviewing strategies, note-taking, ways of coding or indexing information, data analysis, and approaches to writing. The course assignments will revolve around one ethnographic project. You can your own topic it can be a component of your thesis, if you like or you can pick one of the suggested research topics. Youll take notes, keep a field journal, select and talk to informants, and write it up as a short research paper. At the end of the course, you will present this project to the class. You will submit your final paper for journal publication. Required Texts: H. Russell Bernard, Research Methods in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches (4th edition). Altamira Press. Tom Boellstorff, 2008. Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Assignments Students will engage in a small-scale and experimental research project over the course of the semester. Each student will keep a field journal (paper or electronic) that collates completed writing assignments, including observational logs, research diary entries, interview notes, sketches, diagrams, and other data related to the on-going project. I will consult the field journal on one occasion to check on progress. You are encouraged to treat the journal as a field diary, and to write in it as often as you see fit. You should also keep notes on reading assignments in the journal. Writing assignments, to be included in the journal, are noted intermittently on the syllabus.

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All students are expected to actively participate in class discussion. Each student will select one day to lead class discussion. Discussion leaders should submit to me a list of questions/topics for discussion in advance of the class. Your ongoing research projects will also be continually incorporated into class discussion. Every week, well have a quick debriefing where youll be asked to report on the progress of your research project and encouraged to talk through any interesting findings, difficulties, or successes youre encountering. We will all learn from watching each other muddle through an ethnographic research project, from the planning to the implementation to writing up. A draft paper (3,000-5,000 words) will be due on 30 October 2008. It should describe the goals of the project, the methods employed, and the results. Note that only 20% of your final mark will be based on this first draft. An additional 20% of your final mark will be based on how you revise the paper. You will have two weeks to revise from the time I return your paper with my comments and suggestions for revision. Finally, after revising, you will submit your paper for publication to a journal, magazine, or online venue. A final 10% of your final mark will be based on whether you submit this paper for publication. P.S.: I am completely flexible about what kind of publication you want to write for it can be for a popular or an academic audience. Your writing style, therefore, should be tailored to the audience you intend to publish for. Assessment Seminar attendance and participation: 20% Leading seminar discussion one time: 20% Mid-term assessment of journal keeping 10% Draft research paper 20% Revision of research paper: 20% Submission of research paper for publication: 10% Please note that to pass this course, you need to attend a minimum of half of the seminars and you need to submit a draft research paper. Failure to do either will result in a failing mark, regardless of your performance in other aspects of the course. (See Assessment and Some Writing Guidelines at the end of this course outline for more specific guidance on the research paper.) Learning outcomes During this course, students will be exposed to the following concrete research tools / skills: - How to write a human research ethics application; - How to conduct cultural domain analysis; - Be exposed to 2 different types of qualitative data analysis software; - Be introduced to methods of social mapping and time allocation analysis; - Learn techniques of unobtrusive observing; - Learn open-ended interviewing techniques, including several effective interview probes.

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More broadly, students will: - Learn about current debates over human research ethics and informed consent; - Design, implement, and write up their own independent research project ; - Learn how to submit a research paper for publication; - Reflect on the differences/similarities between applied and academic anthropology; - Think about the selection of informants and field sites and how they shape both methodologies and research outcomes; - Reflect on the ethical issues raised by anthropologys characteristic methodology, participant observation, and how that is different from ethical considerations of other disciplinary methods; - Study the application of ethnographic methodologies to new, virtual or cyber social spaces. WEEK 1 INTRODUCTION 7 August 2008 Introductions and talking about course projects. One of the major goals I have as a teacher is to see my students publish. There are countless journals out there (Sage alone publishes 470 journals!), and a requirement of this course is that you do an original research project and submit your final paper for publication somewhere. You can write a paper as an individual or a group. You dont have to get it published, but you do have to submit to get full credit on your paper! Well talk about journals, about social science writing and publishing, and make concrete plans to work toward that goal. See the end of this course outline for suggested research projects. Human Research Ethics To do a research project involving human subjects, you will need to get approval from the universitys human ethics review panel. If you are doing a project that does not involve protected subjects (including but not limited to children, the mentally incapacitated, the incarcerated, and Aboriginal Australians) or investigation into any illegal activity, then this is typically a quick review and can take as little as a month to receive approval. Otherwise it can take somewhat longer. If you choose your own research project, youll need to work quickly to get human ethics review board approval for your research project in this class. One way around this is to make your research project for this class connect with your thesis project. If youve already gotten ethics approval for your thesis, then you can use it for this research as long as youre not doing anything substantially different than what you outlined in your original application for ethics approval. Even if you are planning on doing something different, as long as it still ties in with your thesis project, you can simply file an amended application. Otherwise, you will need to submit your ethics application to me by the SECOND WEEK OF CLASS.

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If you decide to do one of the pre-approved, suggested research topics, then there will be less lag time waiting for ethics approval before you can start your research. Well discuss research topics and the human research ethics approval process in class. JOURNAL: Write a description, 1-2 pages long, of your research topic. In it, you should: 1) briefly describe the project and some broad theoretical questions that relate to it. (For example, you could ask: What is the interface between real life and virtual social worlds in online social games? How do new technologies such as cell phones extend or modify existing cultural norms and social networks?) See the list of suggested research project topics at the end of this course outline for some ideas. 2) Specifically, you should identify: What is the value of this research? What will it tell us that is new? 3) What are the specific methods that you anticipate using to study this research project? If doing interviews, how will you approach research participants? 1 and 2 should basically be a draft of section 10.1 from the ethics review application form see http://www.research.mq.edu.au/researchers/ethics/human_ethics 4) Are there any risks to your informants? How will you ensure the confidentiality and safety of yourself and your research informants? This relates to concrete practices: how will you protect their identities as you do your research (in terms of how you store the data and using pseudonyms for transcribing interviews or writing fieldnotes) and when you write up the final results in a paper (in terms of not just pseudonyms but changing any identifying feature)? Where will you interact with your informants? (e.g. will you keep interactions in public spaces and a cell phone with you at all times?) 5) How will you ensure informed consent of your informants? In particular, think about how you can do this if one of your methodologies is participant observation of your own every day life (for example, if youre researching the social implications of cell phone use) at what point do you bring up your research topic with your friendsinformants, how do you minimize pressure on them to feel like they have to cooperate with you in pursuing your research agenda, and what will you do if they dont want you to write about them? Will you used signed informed consent sheets? Or is there some compelling reason why it would be preferable to obtain oral, rather than written, consent? 6) Finally, you should draft a list of sample questions that you plan to ask your informants, either informally as you interact with them in everyday life, or in a formal interview context. Come up with a list of at least 10 questions. Be concise and think through the ethical research implications of your research project. What you should aim for is a research project that poses no risks to your research participants/ informants beyond slight annoyance. If you think that your project carries greater risk than this, you should come talk to me about it and we can write a separate ethics application that takes these special circumstances into account. Next week: a draft of your human subjects ethics application is due (electronic format!)

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WEEK 2 DISCIPLINARY BOUNDARIES AND ETHICS: WHAT DISTINGUISHES ANTHROPOLOGY FROM...? 14 August Readings: Rena Lederman, Introduction: Anxious borders between work and life in a time of bureaucratic ethics regulation, and Rena Lederman, The perils of working at home: IRB mission creep as context and content for an ethnography of disciplinary knowledges. American Ethnologist 33(4): 477-491 (November 2006). Daniel Bradburd, Fuzzy Boundaries and Hard Rules: Unfunded Research and the IRB. American Ethnologist 33(4): 492-498 (November 2006). American Anthropological Association Code of Ethics

Class discussion: led by ______________________&___________________________ JOURNAL: By this week, you should have formulated your research project or site and submitted a draft of your ethics application to me (for those of you who have picked an independent research project). This should be in electronic, NOT paper, format. During the week, I will read these and return with edits, comments, and suggestions for revision. A finalized version must be submitted by Week 3 (again in electronic format). Class discussion: 1) Research topics from broad rubrics to an actionable research project 2) PowerPoint presentation: Two ways of looking at informed consent (ppt presentation and background readings, by Brooke Ronald Johnson and Francine van den Borne, will be available on Blackboard) WEEK 3 WHAT MAKES FOR APPLIED ANTHROPOLOGY? 21 August Readings: Daniel Jordan Smith, 1983. Cell Phones, Sharing, and Social Status in an African Society. In Applying Anthropology: An Introductory Reader, 8th edition. A Podolefsky and P Brown, eds. New York: McGraw Hill, pp.305-312 (chapter 46). The Associated Press and the Context-Based Research Group, 2008. A New Model for News: Studying the Deep Structure of Young-Adult News Consumption (Research Report). pp.1-70.

Additional readings and viewings (not required):

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Honadle, George. 1982. Rapid reconnaissance for development administration: Mapping and moulding organizational landscapes. World Development 10(1982):8. Bentley, M.E. et al. 1988. Rapid Ethnographic Assessment: Application in a Dietary Management of Diarrhea Program in Nigeria and Peru. Social Science and Medicine 27(1):107-116. http://research.nokia.com/people/jan_chipchase/ and http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/190

*Your finalized ethics application must be submitted to me electronically by today. For class discussion: In the readings for this week, one is report on an applied anthropology project for a corporate client, while the other is written for a more traditional anthropological audience. Yet the more traditional ethnographic study clearly could be applied effectively by a company or industry to improve marketing and sales strategies. So what makes for applied anthropology? Class discussion: led by ______________________&___________________________ WEEK 4 (AUTHENTIC) FIELDWORK AND (AUTHENTIC) INFORMANTS 28 August Readings: From required text: Bernard, Research Methods in Anthropology. Nonprobability Sampling and Choosing Informants. Edward M. Bruner, 2005. Introduction to Culture on Tour: Ethnographies of Travel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp.1-29. Additional readings (not required): Vincanne Adams, 1996. Introduction: Lament for Pasang. In Tigers of the Snow and Other Virtual Sherpas. Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp.3-38 James Boon, Cosmopolitan Moments: As-if Confessions of an EthnographerTourist (Echoey Cosmomes). In J. Boon, Verging on Extra-Vagance: Anthropology, History, Religion, Literature, Arts...Showbiz. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp.103-123. Claude Lvi-Strauss, Parana, Chapter 17 of Tristes Tropiques, pp.153-160.

JOURNAL: Reflect on the kinds of informants you are working with in your research project, and the kinds of questions you are asking them (formal and informal). How does the notion of authenticity come to bear on your selection / inclusion of informants and the questions you ask them? Class discussion: led by ______________________&___________________________

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WEEK 5 WHAT IS AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL FIELD SITE? 4 September Readings: Akhil Gupta & James Ferguson, Discipline and Practice: The Field as Site, Method, and Location in Anthropology. In Gupta and Ferguson, eds., Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science. University of California Press, pp.1-46. Arjun Appadurai, Global Ethnoscapes: Notes and Queries for a Transnational Anthropology, in Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present, edited by Richard G. Fox. SAR Press 1991, pp.191-21. Additional readings (not required): Max Weber, Objectivity in Social Science and Social Policy. In The Methodology of the Social Sciences, Free Press, pp.49-112. Emile Durkheim, What is a social fact? and Rules for the Observation of Social Facts. The Rules of the Sociological Method, (Edited by Steven Lukes; translated by W.D. Halls). New York: Free Press, 1982, pp. 50-84. JOURNAL: Reflect on your field site and on the ways that place and space shapes your methodology and the kind of research youre able to undertake. Class discussion: led by ______________________&___________________________ WEEK 6 VIRTUAL FIELD SITES 11 September Readings: Tom Boellstorff, 2008. Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Additional readings (not required): Tom Boellstorff, 2006. A Ludicrous Discipline? Ethnography and Game Studies. Games and Culture 1(1):29-35. Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and SocialistFeministm in the Late Twentieth Century. In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge, 1991, pp.149-181. Julian Dibbell, A Rape in Cyberspace, in My Tiny Life, 1998, available online at http://www.juliandibbell.com/texts/bungle.html. Radhika Gajjala, Introduction and Chapters 1-2, Cyber Selves: Feminist Ethnographies of South Asian Women. Alta Mira Press, 2004, pp.1-27

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JOURNAL: You should identify concrete observational sites, either locations or events or institutions, which you will describe and analyze in your project. How traditional is this fieldsite? Reflectively consider the strengths and weaknesses of the potential sites you have identified. How will you tailor your methods to the particular sites where you are working? Class discussion: led by ______________________&___________________________ WEEK 7 - POSITIONS: WATCHING &/OR PARTICIPATING 18 September Readings: From required text: Bernard, Research Methods in Anthropology. Direct and indirect observation (chapter 15). Michel de Certeau, Walking in the City. Chapter 7 in The Practice of Everyday Life. 1988, University of California Press, pp.91-110. Gross, Daniel R. 1984. Time Allocation: A Tool for the Study of Cultural Behavior. Annual Review of Anthropology 13:519-58. Additional readings (not required): From required text: Bernard, Research Methods in Anthropology. Participant Observation (chapter 13). Class activity: Observational foray. You will split up into 4 groups and venture out onto campus. Each group will be assigned one of 4 locations: (1) outside the entrance to the library, (2) Marxines, (3) Globe Caf, or (4) the U@MQ cafeteria. (If you would like to propose an alternative you may, as long as its any other spot on campus where theres social activity with people moving about.) You will have until 7pm to observe 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 as a group what activities to note and 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; how many smoke before entering? Or, if you are observing at a caf, you might do a time allocation analysis, paying close attention to how much time caf 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 smoke 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 caf. 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

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after they pay for their drink? If youre 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 should divide up the workload amongst the group. 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 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. At 7pm, report back to the classroom where each group will have 15 minutes to describe what they observed and reflect on methodological issues / problems that arose during the exercise. You might want to regroup a bit before 7pm to decide who will present the groups findings and how. [no class discussion leaders this week] JOURNAL: Compile an annotated bibliography of readings that are relevant to your research project and paper. What this basically means is a list of background readings you should come up with at least 10 with some commentary on each reading. Below the bibliographical information, you should write a paragraph (3-5 sentences) about what each reading covers and how it is relevant to your research project. Note, too, how each reading relates to other readings or a broader literature on the same topic. This annotated bibliography must be included in your journal, which I will be reviewing the week of 9 October. SEMESTER BREAK FOR 2 WEEKS Work on your research projects if youve gotten ethics approval by this time. Note progress in your journal. When we reconvene (9 October): Journal review so dont forget to bring your journals to class!

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WEEK 8 - INTERVIEWING AND CULTURAL DOMAIN ANALYSIS 9 October Readings: From required text: Bernard, Research Methods in Anthropology. Interviewing: Unstructured and semistructured and Structured Interviewing: Cultural Domain Analysis. Also, scan Bernards The Literature Search Additional readings (not required): S.P. Borgatti, 1994. Cultural Domain Analysis. Journal of Quantitative Anthropology 4:261-278. Charles O Frake, 1961. Diagnosis of Disease among the Subanun of Mindanao. American Anthropologist 63:113-132. Anthony F.C. Wallace and John Atkins, 1960. The Meaning of Kinship Terms. American Anthropologist 62:58-80. Smith, J.Jerome. 1995. Salience counts: A domain analysis of English color terms. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 5(2):203-216. JOURNAL REVIEW THIS WEEK. (Hand in your journal for review no journal assignment for this week.) 1-hour Class Activity: Cultural Domain Analysis. We will break into 3 or 4 groups. Class will break up into 3-4 groups. Each group will select a cultural domain (also called semantic domain) and map it out. Everyone in the group will be both informant and ethnographer who will work on mapping out the selected cultural domain. One of the most fascinating things about cultural or semantic domain analysis is Or, you can all be both informants and ethnographers, but be prepared to explain the differences in classification systems that you discover between different people in the group. First: Select a domain You may choose a domain based on the expertise of one or more people in the group, but here are a few suggestions: - Plants for offices (What kinds of plants are suitable for offices? How do you group / classify different types of plants that might be kept on an office desk?) - Common illnesses, symptoms, diagnosis, and treatment (For example, what do you call a cold and what do you call the flu and what do you call gastro? What symptoms are seen as signaling different ailments? What do you do for each illness? When do you visit the doctor, what home remedies or purchased medicines from the chemist do you use to treat each?) - Kinship and kin terms (Pick one informant and find out how she or he classifies different relatives. What are the names used to describe each relative? What are egos social obligations to each relative and vice versa? How often does ego see each type of relative?)

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Dirty words (What does your informant consider vulgar, dirty, or curse words? When are they used? When should they not be used? Kinds of junk food (What kinds of food do you consider junk food and when are these eaten?) Reasons to have sex (See Harpers Magazine, Prisoners of Sex, in the January 2008 issue, p.30).

Second: Use free listing (see Bernard) to gather a group of terms associated with this domain. Write each term on a separate slip of paper. - For example, list all plants that might appear in an office. - List all colds, all possible symptoms, all home remedies used, all drugs that can be purchased from the chemist to treat a cold, etc. - List all kin terms as many as you possibly can. Or list all family social events through the year where you might encounter relatives. - List all dirty words you know of, in any language. List contexts in which you might hear them used. - List all kinds of junk food. Then list appropriate times when each food is eaten. - List all reasons why a person might have sex on any given day/night. Third: Rank the lists of terms youve come up with. Importantly, you should find more than one way of ranking the terms, so you can think about different cultural ways of establishing hierarchies within the same set of concepts. - For example, list plants in order of most suitable for the office, most commonly found in offices, prettiest, etc. - Order drugs from most to least effective, or best to least known; or order illnesses from most debilitating to least, etc. - Rank kin in terms of closeness to ego, or importance in egos life. - Rank the dirty words in terms of least to most dirty or offensive. (It can be very interesting to do a comparison between words in 2 languages and see how different words get ranked. For example, in English, the slang term for the male sexual organ is not considered nearly as vulgar as the slang term for the female sexual organ. But in some dialects of Arabic, the reverse is true.) - Rank the reasons that someone might have sex in terms of: pleasure (does one reason lead to more pleasurable sex than another?), morality (is one reason more moral than another?), utility, etc. Fourth: Free Pile Sort. Write each term on a separate piece of paper and sort them into piles as many piles as each informant wants. Then each informant should explain the logic behind the sorting. Finally: Present findings. Each group should spend up to 10 minutes summarizing their findings to the class, focusing particularly on the similarities and differences between how each informant came up with lists, rankings, and sortings of terms. Class discussion: led by ______________________ (only one discussion leader)

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WEEK 9 - A CRITIQUE OF INTERVIEWING 16 October Readings: Charles Briggs, The acquisition of metacommunicative competence & Listen before you leap: toward methodological sophistication, in Learning How to Ask, Cambridge University Press. From Russell Bernard, Research Methods in Anthropology, third edition. Unobtrusive Observation. JOURNAL: Conduct at least one interview with someone in your research site related to the themes of your study. There is no need to record or transcribe the interview. However, do take notes. Write an analysis of the interview i.e. summarize what you learned and what more you need to know in your journal. Also, consider diverse ways of gaining insight and other ways of documenting your research. Would photographic or audio evidence be helpful? What is your own knowledge/experience of the subject/site you are investigating? How can you incorporate that knowledge into what you are learning? Alternately, if your subject is foreign to you, how do your own responses to research assignments and settings help you to understand the questions you have posed and the sort of answers to them you might be able to produce? Class activity (no class discussion leaders today): We will split the class into two groups, and each group gets to interview me. Youll get 15 minutes to decide, as a group, the following: 1) What will you ask me about? pick a theme, and the skys the limit. Dont be shy you can ask me about anything as personal as you want. Assume fully informed consent. But note that I reserve the right to refuse to answer any question or to lie in any of my answers! 2) Decide who is going to interview me (can be more than one person). Select someone else to take notes on what I say, and yet another person (or persons) to take notes on other nonverbal cues: gestures, posture, nervous tics, etc., and note: what kinds of gestures go with different topics of conversation? 3) Youll have 15 minutes to interview me about the topic. Afterwards, members of the group will analyze the interview: what did I say, and what did I NOT say? Am I holding anything back? Lying about anything? Did you think that a particular topic or question made me happy, confident, uncomfortable, nervous, sad? What were you able to capture by taking notes, and what werent you able to capture? Do you think note-taking without audio or video recording is sufficient to capture the interview? What can you get from an interview that you cant get from participant observation, and vice versa?

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WEEK 10 - NOTE-TAKING, RECORD-KEEPING, MANAGING INFORMATION 23 October Readings: From required text: Bernard, Research Methods in Anthropology. Fieldnotes: How to take them, code them, manage them. Online: www.qsrinternational.com, www.evernote.com

JOURNAL: Now that you are writing up your research paper, Class discussion: led by ______________________&___________________________

WEEK 11 - POLITICAL AND ETHICAL QUESTIONS 30 October Readings: Nancy Scheper-Hughes, 1995. The Primacy of the Ethical: Towards a Militant Anthropology. Anthropology 36(3): 409420. Laura Nader, 1972. Up the Anthropologist: Perspectives Gained from Studying Up. In Reinventing Anthropology, ed. D. Hymes. New York: Pantheon Books. Additional readings (not required): Jean Comaroff & John Comaroff, 2003. Ethnography on an Awkward Scale. Ethnography 4(2): 147-179.

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Joel Robbins, 1997. When do you think the world will end? Globalization, Apocalypticism, and the Moral Perils of Fieldwork in Last New Guinea. Anthropology and Humanism 22(l):6-30

JOURNAL / Final paper: Write an ethnographic synthesis of the research you completed. Remember that ethnographic synthesis weds theory to data in the medium of analysis. Consider rival styles of ethnographic presentation. How 'reflexive' will you be? What kinds of data will you include? Will your style be dry and scientific? Poetic and/or prosaic? How will you describe your informants? Will your presentation be conventional or will it break the mold (mould?!)? Will you include graphs? Charts? Photographs? This week: a draft of your research paper is due to me, electronically. Please note: you will still have to revise and resubmit it after youve received feedback on the draft, so you may want to continue doing research after youve submitted the draft if you think theres still more work to be done that can be incorporated in the final draft of the paper. Class discussion: led by ______________________&___________________________ WEEKS 12 AND 13- WRAPPING IT UP WITH CLASS PRESENTATIONS OF RESEARCH. 6 November & 13 November No class discussion leaders these weeks. Each student will have 10-15 minutes to discuss her or his research project in class. Reflect on the methodological issues that came up during the course of your research, how those shaped the data you were able to gather, and how different your final research paper was from the research project that you originally started with. A revision of your research paper is due 2 weeks from the time I return it to you with comments and feedback. By now you should have an idea of what journal you want to submit your paper for publication in. Your final assignment for the class is not graded, but its the most important: submit your paper to a journal. You must give me a copy of the submission to receive the final 10% of credit for this course assignment.

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ADDITIONAL READINGS AND RESOURCES IN APPLIED ANTHROPOLOGY Baker, Wayne and Philip Schumm. 1992. Introduction to network analysis for management. Connections 15(1,2) Becker, H. S. 1985. Problems of inference and proof in participant observation. American Sociological Review 23:653-660. Becker, H. S. and B. Greer. 1957. Participant observation and interviewing: A comparison. Human Organization 16:28-32. Bernard, H. Russell, Peter Killworth, David Kronenfeld and Lee Sailer 1984. The Problem of Informant Accuracy: The Validity of Retrospective Data. Annual Review of Anthropology 13:495-517. Dexter, L. A., ed. 1970. Elite and specialized interviewing. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Kotler, Philip and Eduado L. Roberto. 1989. Social Marketing: Strategies for Changing Public Behavior. New York: Free Press. McKillip, Jack. 1987. Need Analysis: Tools for the human services and education. Applied Social Research Methods, Volume 10. Newbury park, CA: Sage Publications. Locke, Lawrence F. 1993. Proposals That Work: A Guide for Planning Dissertations and Grant Proposals. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Myers, Vincent 1977. Toward a Synthesis of Ethnographic and Survey Methods. Human Organization 35(3):244,26l. Morgan, David L. 1988. Focus groups as qualitative research. Qualitative Research Methods, Volume 16. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications. Rohner, R., B. R. DeWalt, and R. C. Ness. 1973. Ethnographer bias in cross-cultural research. Behavior Science Research 8:275-317. Romney, A. K. 1989. Quantitative models, science, and cumulative knowledge. Journal of Quantitative Anthropology 1(1/2):153-223. Rynkiewich, Michael A., and James P. Spradley. 1976. Ethics in Anthropology: Dilemmas in fieldwork. New York: Wiley and Sons. Sibley, Barbara J. 1980. Urban Impact Assessment: An Update and Commentary. Practicing Anthropology 2(4):7-8,22-23.

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Silverman, Sydel. 1991. Writing grant proposals for anthropological research. CA 32(4):485-489. Smalley, William A. 1960. Making and keeping anthropological field notes. Practical Anthropology 7:145-152. Spier, Robert F. G. 1970. Surveying and mapping: A Manual of simplified techniques. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. Patricia L. Sunderland and Rita M. Denny, 2007. Doing Anthropology in Consumer Research. Left Coast Press. Whyte, William Foote. 1957. On Asking indirect questions. Human Organization 15:2123. Willms, Dennis G., et al. 1990. A Systematic approach for using qualitative methods in primary prevention research. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 4(4):391-409. Wolfe, Alvin W. 1978. The rise of network thinking in anthropology. Social Networks 1(1978):53-64.

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RESEARCH PAPER: SUGGESTED TOPICS AND WRITING GUIDELINES 4 SUGGESTED TOPICS 1. AN ETHNOGRAPHIC STUDY OF THE SOCIAL MEANINGS AND USE OF MOBILE PHONES IN SYDNEY. Anthropologists have always been interested in the relationship between technology and culture. Contemporary anthropologists have recently been particularly interested in the spread of global communication technologies and how they are taken up in local social and cultural contexts (Axel 2006). Cell phones, in particular, have been revealed as devices which extend social networks in unique ways and which have been incorporated into local cultural norms about sharing, gift giving and exchange, and economic strategies (Smith 2007, Horst and Miller 2006, Wong 2007). Corporate anthropologists have also researched the materiality of cell phones where they are carried, how they are held, when they are turned off and on to inform product design (Chipchase 2007). Sociologists and psychologists have also examined the uptake of cell phone and messaging technologies amongst subcultural groups (e.g. Sylvia and Hady 2004). Globally, some 3 billion people are expected to have cell phones by the end of this year, so it is clearly a technology that has a powerful global reach across cultures and socioeconomic class, and Jan Chipchase has argued that this is because of a universal appreciation of its ability to transcend space and time, its privacy and convenience, its accessibility for even illiterate populations, and its potential to be used for innovative street banking and other economic transactions (Chipchase 2007). How do new technologies such as cell phones extend or modify existing cultural norms and social networks? What are the explicit and implicit cultural rules that shape how people use these technologies? Theres a lot thats been written on this subject, so think: what can you do that is unique and will add to the literature? You might decide to focus on the cultural meanings of cell phone use amongst a particular subculture that you know well, for example, or you might try to think of a clever way to study peoples interpretation of the strategy of Australian cell phone providers to market minutes of talk time in terms of dollar equivalents (i.e. pay $29 and get $200 of talk time! but how is it $200 if you paid $29 for it, and nobody ever pays $200 for that amount of talk time?) Method: This research project is designed as a study of material culture, which will be studied specifically through a targeted questionnaire to be administered on public streets and other public spaces through convenience sampling. You may either use the suggested questions below, or develop your own set of interview questions: Sample interview questions: - What things do you do with your cell phone? (e.g. talk, take pictures, send SMS, read and send e-mail, access the Internet, keep track of appointments, etc)

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- When do you use your cell phone? - When do you avoid using your cell phone? - When do you turn on your cell phone, and when do you turn it off? - Who do you call on your cell phone? - How did you decide to buy the particular cell phone that you use? - How do you decide on a calling / minutes plan for your cell phone? - What does it mean when a mobile service provider says that $29 = $200 of talk time? You should aim to recruit at least 50 people for this study, which may involve multiple sessions of interviewing. (See what Bernard 2006 has to say about the numbers needed to produce robust and reliable results when undertaking quantitative research.) If more than one person decides to undertake this research project, you may wish to ask the same questions and pool your results together (once the data is deidentified and pseudonyms assigned) so that you have more data to analyze. In addition to a quantitative survey, you may also want to ground this project in participant observation of your own life and that of your friends, relatives, and colleagues. Watch and listen: how do you use your cell phone to communicate with people? How do your friends use their cell phones? Think about the materiality of cell phones: where do you put them during the day? Where and when do you buy them, how do you pay for talk time? Do you text or call more? Do you speak openly in public places or do you retreat to private spaces to talk on the phone? Is any aspect of cell phone use part of a gift economy (see Marcel Mausss classic The Gift and Daniel Jordan Smiths study of cell phone use in Nigeria), is it just a commodity, or does it straddle both economies? You may wish to supplement participant observation with targeted interviews of friends within a social network. Some recommended readings: Daniel Jordan Smith, 2007. Cell Phones, Sharing, and Social Status in an African Society. In Applying Anthropology: An Introductory Reader, 8th edition. A Podolefsky and P Brown, eds. New York: McGraw Hill, pp.305-312 (chapter 46). Heather A. Horst and Daniel Miller, 2006. The Cell Phone: An Anthropology of Communication. Berg. John Lycette and Robin Dunbar, 2000. Mobile Phones are Lekking Devices among Human Males. Human Nature 11(1): 93-104. K.N. Sylvia and S.W. Hady, 2004. Communication Pattern with SMS: Short Message Service and MMS: Multimedia Message Service as a Trend of Conduct of Modern Teenagers. International Journal of Psychology 39(5-6): 289. Andrew Wong, 2007. The Local Ingenuity: Maximizing Livelihood through Improvising Current Communication Access Technology. Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference Proceedings. Oct 2007, Vol. 2007, No. 1: 104-114. Brian Keith Axel, 2006. Anthropology and the New Technologies of Communication. Cultural Anthropology. 21(3): 354-384.

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Jan Chipchase, Our Cellphones, Ourselves. Talk for TED: Ideas Worth Spreading, March 2007. http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/190

2. AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF A VIRTUAL ONLINE SOCIAL WORLD [Note: the virtual world proposed for study here is Second Life, because we are reading an ethnography of Second Life and because Linden Labs, the owners of SL, have an explicit policy allowing researchers to study SL after they have obtained consent from their local institutional ethics review committees. However, if you want to explore another virtual world or tool such as World of Warcraft or Sim City, you may do so but you will have to get the written approval of the owner(s) of the computer program (this can be in the form of an e-mail) and provide this to the Macquarie Ethics Committee as an addendum to the basic ethics application before you may begin research.] Tom Boellstorff poses this question: How is everything from identity and community to property, place, and politics shaped the fact that human beings can how live parts of their lives in virtual worlds? For this research project, you should pick an online social community and then think: methodologically, how would I research this world? Theres been quite a bit of research already being done on virtual social worlds (see Boellstorffs book, Coming of Age in Second Life, for a literature review). Your challenge is to design a research project to narrowly examine one specific, interesting question. Here are some suggestions: - How are social norms enforced and violated, and how does that contribute to a sense of community? - What does identity mean in a massive multiplayer online role playing game when people can have alts or more than one person can control an avatar or toon? - What does embodiment mean in Second Life, where you can change your gender, body type, and skin color at will, where other players can even *give* you a new body type to wear, and you can buy a penis to use for cybersex? Do people change certain aspects of appearance clothes, adornment, etc more than others (e.g. body parts, skin color)? How often to people change their appearance? To what extent does an avatars appearance influence how people interact with that avatar? (This is something that Nick Yee and Jeremy Bailenson have studied with interesting results: see Dusan Writer, http://dusanwriter.com/?p=237 : Nick Yee studied what he called the Proteus Effect of avatar appearance and representation on how we act and behave in virtual worlds. His study found, for example, that people with more attractive avatars were more intimate in self disclosure and interpersonal distance than those with less attractive avatars. Also, people with taller avatars behaved more confidently in a negotiation task than those assigned shorter avatars.) - What religious or cultural rituals do people engage in, in cyberspace? - What are the social norms for gift-giving in cyberspace, what are the norms of reciprocity, and how does this contribute to community and sociability in cyber

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worlds? (See the Daedalus Project, http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/ : a researcher not an anthropologist has surveyed players of MMORPGs and found that when players recount one of the most memorable things that have happened to them online, they often talk about the generosity and kindness of other players who give them things for free and advise them on how to master that social world.) Are there coercive exchanges (c.f. Dibbell, below), and how are they handled or talked about? Or you could study partnering in Second Life: How does it happen, did online partners previously know each other in real life, and if not, how does it impinge on their real life worlds? What is the interface between Second Life and real life? Without probing this specifically by asking people about their offline personas (since you want to avoid violating their privacy), you might want to pay close attention to whether people talk about their offline lives (and how often), or do they avoid letting their offline lives impinge on their Second Life?

Some recommended readings / resources: Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and SocialistFeministm in the Late Twentieth Century. In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge, 1991, pp.149-181. Arturo Escobar, 1994. Welcome to Cyberia: Notes on the Anthropology of Cyberculture. Current Anthropology 35(3): 211-231. Julian Dibbell, A Rape in Cyberspace, in My Tiny Life, 1998, available online at http://www.juliandibbell.com/texts/bungle.html. Vili Lehdonvirta, 2008. Virtual Worlds Dont Exist. Paper presented at Breaking the Magic Circle, Tampere, Finland, 10-11 April 2008. Available online at http://virtual-economy.org/files/Lehdonvirta-VWDE.pdf (retrieved June 17, 2008). Radhika Gajjala, Introduction and Chapters 1-2, Cyber Selves: Feminist Ethnographies of South Asian Women. Alta Mira Press, 2004, pp.1-27 Tom Boellstorff, 2008. Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. Princeton: Princeton University Press. If you decide to do research on Second Life, Tom Boellstorff has set up a virtual space within Second Life for anthropologists doing research ON Second Life: http://slurl.com/secondlife/anteater%20island/72/107/24/ . See also recent discussions about Boellstorffs book on http://www.savageminds.org . Tom Boellstorff, 2006. A Ludicrous Discipline? Ethnography and Game Studies. Games and Culture 1(1):29-35. Danah Boyd lists and links to her publications on Friendster, Flickr, and Facebook: http://www.danah.org/papers/ Lila Abu-Lughod, 1997. The interpretation of culture(s) after television. Representations 59:109-134. Nick Yee and Jeremy Bailenson, n.d. The Proteus Effect: The Effect of Transformed Self-Representation on Behavior. In press in Human Communication Research (see

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http://www.nickyee.com/pubs/Yee%20&%20Bailenson%20%20Proteus%20Effect%20(in%20press).pdf ). N. Baym, 1995. The emergence of community in computer mediated communication. In S.G. Jones (ed.) Cybersociety: Computer Mediated Communication and Community. Sage, pp.138-163. S. Correll, 1995. The ethnography of an electronic bar: the Lesbian Cafe. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 24(3):270-298. D. Heath, 1997. Locating genetic knowledge: picturing Marfan syndrome and its travelling constituencies. Science, Technology and Human Values 23(1):7197. S.G. Jones, 1995. Cybersociety: Computer Mediated Communication and Community. Sage. George Marcus, 1995. Ethnography in/of the world system: the emergence of multi-sited ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology 24:95-117. J. Radway, 1988. Reception study: ethnography and the problem of dispersed audiences and nomadic subjects. Cultural Studies 2(3):359-376. E. Reid, 1995. Virtual worlds: culture and imagination. In S.G. Jones (ed.) Cybersociety: Computer Mediated Communication and Community. Sage, pp.164-183. Christine Hine, 2000. Virtual Ethnography. Sage. Chris Kelty, 2005. Geeks, Social Imaginaries, and Recursive Publics. Cultural Anthropology 20(2): 185-214. A few anthro blog entries on the topic: http://neuroanthropology.net/2007/12/30/avatars-and-cultural-creole/ http://facebookproject.blogspot.com/ http://xirdal.lmu.de/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi/2007/05/23

3. AN APPLIED ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDY OF THE SOCIAL USE OF SPACE ON CAMPUS AND ITS RELATIONSHIP WITH INTELLECTUAL CLIMATE.* Heres a real life problem. Macquarie University has ranked poorly in recent HDR student evaluations of intellectual climate on campus, relative to other Australian schools. U@MQ is eager to think about new ways that the food and social facilities on campus could be restructured to be more appealing and better utilized. Might these be linked? Do students most formative moments at university happen inside or outside of the classroom? How is social time in or outside of the classroom related to intellectual interaction? To what extent is intellectual climate shaped by space and facilities? What other factors shape the perception of intellectual climate on campus? Are there any inexpensive or cost-effective interventions that you can recommend to improve the intellectual climate for students at Macquarie? Here are some angles to consider:

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1) In the library, how do students mark off spaces for individual and group work? The library is the most formal learning space on campus. How do students claim it to be more informal? 2) How much does home life influence use of public spaces on campus? Do students who use the campus do so to escape from home life for whatever reason? 3) Using the language of de Certeau, what are the tactics that students use to claim space and how does it differ from the ostensible ways that the space was designed to be used? Methodologies for this research project might involve a careful observational study of the use of space around campus, interviews and/or focus groups with students to understand how they spend their time on campus and use campus facilities, and interviews and observation should be supplemented with participant observation methods to try to understand the unsaid of the social. This is a team project. It is recommended that no more than 4 people work on this project. Everyone who chooses to participate in this project should communicate regularly with each other about research progress, obstacles, and breakthroughs. At the same time, each person will be responsible for their own part of the project, which will ensure that assessment takes place individually, not for the group as a whole, and this will hopefully mitigate against the free rider problem that often occurs in group work, where one or two people let the others do all the work. Heres how I suggest you structure this: 1) Each person should choose to focus on a particular area. For example, one person might look at the library, while others look at the sports center, NCELTR, and the foyer of E6A (which has been set up with wireless and lots of outlets and is popularly used for accessing the Internet). Each person will be responsible for doing the research in, and writing about, that particular area. These will each constitute an ethnographic subsection of the final paper. 2) Each person will be responsible for writing one overarching section of the final paper after consulting with the other members in the group: the introduction and stating the problem, the literature review, the synthesis and analysis of the ethnographic research, and the policy recommendations. Everybody has to contribute material for all of these sections, but only one person will take responsibility for writing each individual section. When the final paper is submitted, youll need to identify who did what section. 3) The assessment (and grading) for this project will work a little differently than for other research papers. Half of the assessment will be done by your peers. In other words, of the 20% of your final grade that the draft of the paper is worth, 10% will consist of the aggregate mark given, confidentially, by other members of your group, and 10% will come from me. In short, if youre a free rider and leave all the work to your peers to do, then they will give you a bad grade for it! Outcomes: 1) The final outcome of this project should be a research and policy paper, modeled roughly along the lines of the Associate Press study from Week 3 (except not as

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long!). In other words: it should consist of an outline of the problem, an ethnographic analysis of use of space on campus, and a list of recommendations for concrete actions that MQ can take to improve the intellectual climate of the university. It should be engaging, readable, graphically designed to be easy to read, and free of esoteric, academic jargon. Assume that your reader will be intelligent but not an anthropologist and not necessarily even a social scientist. 2) You will present your results orally to the Student Engagement and Transition Working Party at Macquarie. ***This project is particularly recommended if you think that you might want to work in corporate anthropology or similar kinds of applied anthropology situations, because it will train you in specific skill sets appropriate for that context: the research and policy paper, as well as the presentation of results to a group outside of the classroom. Some outside readings: Michel de Certeau, Walking in the City. Chapter 7 in The Practice of Everyday Life. 1988, University of California Press, pp.91-110. Gross, Daniel R. 1984. Time Allocation: A Tool for the Study of Cultural Behavior. Annual Review of Anthropology 13:519-58. The Associated Press and the Context-Based Research Group, 2008. A New Model for News: Studying the Deep Structure of Young-Adult News Consumption (Research Report). pp.1-70. Krause K-L., Hartley R., James R. and McInnis C. (2005) The First Year Experience in Australian Universities: Findings from a decade of national studies. Department of Education Science and Training and Centre for the Study of Higher Education, University of Melbourne, Retrieved 30 March 2007 from http://www.cshe.unimelb.edu.au/downloads/FYEReport05KLK.pdf Kuh, GD. (2006) Making Students Matter in J.C. Burke (Ed.), Fixing the fragmented university: Decentralization with Direction, pp.235-264. Bolton, MA: Jossey-Bass. Retrieved 19 September 2007 from http://cpr.iub.edu/uploads/Kuh%20Chapter%2010%20for%20Burke%202006.pdf Mann, S. (2001) Alternative Perspectives on the Student Experience: alienation and engagement. Studies in Higher Education 26(1): 7-19. Retrieved 19 September 2007 from http://taylorandfrancis.metapress.com/index/BWD5LDH5KFG6PJ45.pdf Markwell, D. (2007) The Challenge of Student Engagement. Key-note address Teaching and Learning Forum 2007, University of Western Australia, 30-31 January 2007, Retrieved 26 September 2007 from http://www.catl.uwa.edu.au/CATLyst/current/1/don_markwell McInnis, C. (2003) New realities of the student experience: How should universities respond? UniNews 12(9), Melbourne University, Retrieved 10 October 2007 from http://uninews.unimelb.edu.au/articleid_645.html Rhodes, C. & Nevill, A. (2004) Academic and Social Integration in Higher Education: a survey of satisfaction and dissatisfaction within a first-year education studies cohort at a new university. Journal of Further and Higher

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Education 28(2): 179-193 (May 2004). Retrieved 19 September 2007 from http://taylorandfrancis.metapress.com/index/T7Y71PFT3XTLXRYJ.pdf 4. ORAL HISTORIES OF INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS AT MACQUARIE* The study question: Education is a $12.5 billion export industry for Australia, bringing in more income than tourism (Rout 2008). Yet little is known about the social experience of international students in Australia, despite the fact that they face unique pressures. Rout (2008) summarized recent research that points out that, Contrary to their image as cashed-up BMW drivers, many overseas students cannot afford to eat, are paid well below the minimum wage and are among those most vulnerable to exploitation in this country. For this project, you will conduct oral life histories of international students at Macquarie, focusing on their educational trajectory leading to, and including, their student experience at Macquarie. How did they end up at Macquarie? What are the personal, social, financial, and familial obligations that shape students experiences at university in Australia? What are the cultural factors that influence their integration into, or alienation from, the Macquarie student body? This is an important project because very little qualitative research has been done on the higher education experience of international students in general, and yet they comprise a large minority of students at Macquarie. Letting them speak in their own words about their experiences is an opportunity to learn about the pressures and problems that international students face, their goals and aspirations, and the social and learning strategies that they use to cope with a culturally new educational experience, which Macquarie University may be able to use to improve the experience of international students on campus. It also has the potential to inform our understanding of the informal, affective, and social aspects of learning and intellectual development for international students. Methodology: The Oral History Association of Australia defines Oral History as: A recorded interview in question-and-answer format Conducted by an interviewer who has some knowledge of the subject to be discussed With a knowledgeable interviewee speaking from first-hand experience On subjects of historical interest That is made accessible to other researchers. See http://www.ohaa-sa.com.au/pages/oralhistory.htm , accessed 17 June 2008. The aims of oral history merge in important ways with recent theoretical developments in anthropology which urge anthropologists to gather information in the participants own words, and to let them direct the conversation and focus on what they think is important, which may not necessarily be what the anthropologist thinks is important when s/he first starts her study. Your challenge is to think of open-ended

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questions that prompt discussion, and allow them to talk about what is important to them. Below are a few possible questions. You may probably also want to come up with some of your own, while others may emerge in the context of the interviews themselves. Start with broad questions and listen patiently and empathetically to what people have to say. If they dont have much to say, you can use appropriate prompt questions to gently encourage them to expand on the topic. (But remember what Bernard says: sometimes silence is the best prompt.) How did you end up coming to Australia and Macquarie for a university education? (Prompt questions: Where did you study before? How did you come to know about Macquarie University? How did you apply? Were you already familiar with Australia or was it new to you?) What was your experience like coming to Macquarie for the first time? (Prompt questions: What happened when you first arrived? How did you find a place to live? How did you get to know people and find out what to do on campus? Where did you eat? Etc .) What about family life? (Prompt questions: Where is your family? How often do you see / talk to / write to them? Do they support you financially, or do you support them financially? How have they influenced your decision to study here and what you decided to study?) What is the financial situation like for international students at Macquarie? How do they pay for their schooling? (Note that while previous questions have been directed towards the interviewee, this questions has been phrased more generally. Sometimes finances can be a sensitive issue for people. Phrasing it in this way allows people to avoid the personal if it makes them uncomfortable.) What do you do about health care? (Prompt questions: Do you have insurance? How do you decide when to see a doctor, and how do you pick a doctor?) What do you like about your experience at Macquarie and as a student in Australia? What are the difficulties you have faced as an international student in Australia? What are your plans after graduating?

This is in part a group project. The point of oral history collection is to not only collect histories but to make them available to other researchers. Yet collecting and transcribing oral histories is a time-consuming process. So for the students who choose this research project, each student will undertake a limited number of interviews (a minimum of 5) and will transcribe the interviews that s/he has collected. Then, once each interviewee has had the opportunity to review her or his transcript and agreed to its being made available to others, you will share the transcripts you have produced with other students who are doing the same project. We will also post interview transcripts online on an anthropology department website, ensuring that the histories are available to other researchers.

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You then have two options for how to write up your research results: you can either write your own research paper, drawing on all the oral histories collected (even those collected by other students) in writing your own paper. Or you may wish to co-author a final paper with one of your fellow students. I leave that decision up to you, but if you choose to write a paper collaboratively, then the guidelines for co-authorship and peer assessment that I described in project #3 will apply here too. A few recommended readings (but also pay close attention to the reading selections on interviewing in the course readings): Miranda Rout, 2008. Foreigners are exploited. The Australian, Higher Education, February 6, 2008 (http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23166220-25918,00.html, retrieved June 17, 2008). See Jovan Mauds post on the subject of international students at http://culturematters.wordpress.com/2008/02/07/exploitation-of-foreignstudents/). Thomas L. Charlton . Lois E. Myers , and Rebecca Sharpless, eds., 2006. Handbook of Oral History. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press. D Bertaux and M Kohli, 1984. The Life Story Approach: A Continental View. Annual Review of Sociology 10: 215-237 (August 1984). Rebekah Nathan, 2005. Understanding Student Culture. Anthropology News 46(7):17-18. Peter M. Magolda, 2000. The Campus Tour: Ritual and Community in Higher Education. Anthropology & Education Quarterly 31(1):24-46. Chris Nyland, Helen Forbes-Mewett, Simon Marginson, Gaby Ramia, Erlenawati Sawir, Sharon Smith. International Student-Workers in Australia: A New Vulnerable Workforce. ISANA - International Education Association. PDF available online at http://www.cshe.unimelb.edu.au/people/staff_pages/Marginson/IntStu&WorkFeb 2008.pdf. Erlenawati Sawir, Simon Marginson, Ana Deumert, Chris Nyland, and Gaby Ramia, 2008. Loneliness and International Students: An Australian Study. Journal of Studies in International Education 12: 148-180. Helen Forbes-Mewett and Chris Nyland, 2008. Cultural Diversity, Relocation, and the Security of International Students at an Internationalised University. Journal of Studies in International Education 12: 181-203. Helen Forbes-Mewett, Simon Marginson, Chris Nyland, Gaby Ramia and Erlenawati Sawir. Australian University International Student Finances. PDF available online at http://www.cshe.unimelb.edu.au/people/staff_pages/Marginson/IntStuFinancesFe b2008.pdf. Christine Asmar, 2005. Internationalising students: reassessing diasporic and local student difference. Studies in Higher Education 30(3):291 309.

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Yuefang Zhou, Divya Jindal-Snape, Keith Topping, John Todman, 2008. Theoretical models of culture shock and adaptation in international students in higher education. Studies in Higher Education 33(1):63 75. Gillian Skyrme, 2007. Entering the university: the differentiated experience of two Chinese international students in a New Zealand university. Studies in Higher Education 32(3):357 372. Mardy T. Eimers and Gary R. Pike, 1997. Minority and Nonminority Adjustment to College: Differences or Similarities? Research in Higher Education 38(1). Nattavud Pimpa, 2005. A family affair: The effect of family on Thai students choices of international education. Higher Education 49(4). Gillian M. Boulton-Lewis, Ference Marton, David C. Lewis and Lynn A. Wilss, 2004. A longitudinal study of learning for a group of indigenous Australian university students: Dissonant conceptions and strategies. Higher Education 47(1).

* With thanks to Angela Voerman of the Macquarie University Learning and Teaching Centre for helping develop these suggested research projects.

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ASSESSMENT AND SOME WRITING GUIDELINES The outcome of your research project is up to you. You may wish to write an academic paper, a magazine article, a policy paper, or even produce a website. The way you write will need to be tailored to the genre and your audience, and I will evaluate your writing based on the genre you are writing within. Below are a few guidelines that tell you what I will be looking for. But remember, youll be submitting this for publication, so youre not just writing for me and for this class. ASSESSMENT FOR ACADEMIC WRITING: Your model for writing is a good journal article. Simply stated: write like the best article that is in your list of references. But we can break that down into more particular aspects of good academic writing: - Grammatically correct. It should be obvious, but sometimes its worth stating the obvious: correct spelling, grammar, and punctuation are the most basic elements of good writing, and they tend to give a powerful first impression. If you cant spell, few journal editors will bother to keep reading to find out whether theres anything worthwhile in your ideas. I STRONGLY recommend that you have a fellow classmate or friend read a draft of your paper to check the grammar and spelling before you even submit a draft to me, because I WILL take this into consideration in how I mark your paper! - Beyond just getting the spelling right, assessments of good writing often consider there to be an art to writing about things in a lucid and engaging way. This is something that Ill try to give you guidance on through feedback and you will hone this in the rewrite of the original paper draft. - Organization: Your paper should be well organized; everything clearly links together and makes sense. Sometimes its easy to lose sight of this: after youve been working on a project long enough, it all makes sense to you. So you have to work hard to think: how will this read to an outsider who is coming at the topic completely new? I strongly recommend that you have a fellow classmate or another peer read a draft of your paper and tell you what makes sense and what doesnt. - Introduction: Your introduction is the most important aspect of the paper. It should clearly state the research problem and why it matters. Make us care about the research topic! Consider rhetorical and writing strategies carefully: is there some fascinating anecdote or quote that you can use as a hook to grab the interest of your reader? In your introduction, you should also anticipate the major findings of your study but you should try to leave something to be discovered so that theres still incentive to read the rest of your paper. Dont give it all away in the introduction. Anticipate! Hint: even though it comes first, you should write your introduction LAST! - The literature search: Ive provided lists of references, both anthropological and otherwise, that are starting points, but those lists are far from complete, and you may not find half of whats on any given list to be useful, depending on the particular angle that youre taking for your research project. You should exhaustively search MULTIPLE academic databases to find the relevant literature

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(see http://www.lib.mq.edu.au/databases/). Remember, you will be submitting this for publication, and if a journal decides to send out your paper for review, they will be sending it to the experts in the field that youre writing about, and they will know this literature very well. (Hint: if one of these experts does not find her/himself in your list of references, s/he will not think very much of your literature review, and will probably not evaluate your paper favorably!) I STRONGLY recommend that you make an appointment with a librarian to get some tips on doing a literature search. Another hint: Once youve identified some of the key readings on your topic, examine their references carefully to get some ideas of where to read. If you find the same publication in multiple bibliographies, then you KNOW its something that you have to cite. The literature review: The framing of your research problem should be clearly grounded in a scholarly literature on the topic. After the introduction, the literature review is perhaps the second most important aspect of an academic paper, at least in terms of its prospects for publication. This does NOT mean just summarizing what a few key figures have said. It means being able to thoughtfully synthesize what others have said and how their arguments relate to each other, and then how your analytical perspective is related to what others have written. You need to find a way to show that your research is somehow new and adds substantially to the literature. Nobody will want to publish something that just recaps what others have already said. Hint: One of the most common obstacles that students face is what to do when they dont find literature on their topic. They read and they read and they read, and then they say to me in dismay, No one has written about exactly what Im writing about! This is not bad. This is GOOD. It means that you have something unique to share. Why would you want to write about the same exact thing that someone else has already written about? But the fact that no one has done your exact topic does NOT mean that you have nothing to write about for your literature review. Write about the fact that nothing has been written on that topic! Take what people have written about related topics and ask: Is anything here relevant to my topic? How can their theories be applied in a different ethnographic setting? And how does that different setting affect the theory? Methodology: It is a peculiar characteristic of the discipline of anthropology that in our publications, we often do not explicitly state what methods we have used to reach our conclusions. But this is a methodology class, so for your research paper, I expect you to explicitly discuss the methods you used to research your topic. Whether you decide to do this in a separate section devoted to methods or whether you decide to embed it in another appropriate section of the paper is up to you. Ethics: Many (but not all) journals require an explicit statement acknowledging that your research project was reviewed by an institutional ethics committee. After you decide where youre submitting your paper, read their author guidelines carefully to see what is required. Different journals have different expectations about paper organization, depending on discipline. Some like papers neatly organized into the following sections: Introduction, Background, Methods, Results, Discussion, Conclusion.

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Methodology in Local and Community Studies

Others (such as anthropology journals) tend to have idiosyncratic subheaders and the organizational logic is largely determined by the content of the research paper. Think about where youre going to submit your paper and write it in that style. But no matter what your style, your writing should be ethnographic. This is the defining characteristic of anthropology. Dont just summarize the overall findings while leaving out the interesting data on how you got there. Anthropology is ethnography, i.e. rich description that can help the reader think through the theoretical issues with a concrete grounding in actual life and experience. Make sure that comes through in your writing. Formatting references: Im not going to give you specific rules about how to format your references. There are lots of different styles out there and youll need to format your references according to the guidelines of the journal you are submitting to (see Ethics, above). But heres the general style guidelines of the American Anthropology Association journals: http://www.aaanet.org/publications/guidelines.cfm

ASSESSMENT FOR A POLICY PAPER: This is a genre that is very like an academic paper, with a few key differences: - Typically the disciplinary jargon is pared down so that it can be read by a generalist audience. - The description of the problem and the analysis are the same as an academic paper, but these are followed by a list of policy recommendations, often in point (bullet) form. In other words, you have identified and analyzed a problem, so you conclude with a list of recommendations for how to fix the problem. ASSESSMENT FOR POPULAR WRITING: Instead of looking to an academic journal as a model, look instead to thoughtful magazine articles for examples of this genre. Here are some excellent suggestions for popular but intellectual writing from American Sexuality magazine (http://nsrc.sfsu.edu/MagWebpage.cfm) (from their author guidelines): Articles should be written for the general public. Vivid scene-setting, including quotations and narrativescoupled with a substantial amount of information (facts, historical items, quantitative data)create the most effective articles. Please consider setting a scene for the introductory paragraph. A nut graf should follow the introduction. The nut graf is a paragraph that tells readers why they should care, it provides context and background and often reveals why the topic of the article is timely. Jargon, long sentences and specialized knowledge should not be used. Appealing, evocative, and lively writing is encouraged. The New York Times Magazine, Harpers, or The New Yorker are good examples. Endnotes, footnotes and bibliographies are generally not appropriate. Please incorporate quotes into the text directly, making clear the title of the book or article from which the quote or information came.