10 – 15 pages; 12 point font, double spaced, one-inch margins, formatted bibliography following ASA format.
The purpose of this assignment is to ask a sociological question and answer it thoroughly drawing primarily on evidence gathered during physical and digital ethnographic research and supplemented with contextual and library research, in the style of a professional research article such as might be published in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography.
This final paper weaves together all the elements you have been working on individually throughout the semester.
The article must include these elements, drawing on all previous assignments and workshops:
1) An introductory ethnographic vignette (a short, illustrative story) that poses the burning question of your research.
2) An introduction that lays out a roadmap to the rest of the paper as well as a clear thesis statement (the answer to your burning question, summed up in one to three sentences).
a. Include a description of your methodology: is this a village-based study or a multi-sited “situation” style study? Where and with whom did you gather data? Describe any ethical considerations that arose throughout.
3) A theoretical framework that explains your approach to your subject matter, including any key concept definitions or theoretical tools that inform your question, guide your analysis or inform your overarching argument (ex. If your topic is heavily concerned with race, you should include a scholarly definition of race and a discussion of what it means to investigate race, based on your understanding of the current state of sociological research on this topic).
4) Additional ethnographic vignettes or details that flesh out your argument, providing examples that illustrate the relationships, hidden connections, and points of comparison or distinction that together show the logic of the story you are telling about your fieldsite or issue.
a. Organize these vignettes according to the codes you generated during analysis.
5) Analysis: what this looks like is flexible. You will explain and interpret your data using a variety of analytical tools you practiced this semester, including contextualization (remember how many different things can count as context!), comparison, mapping social roles, metaphors and meanings, etc. Analysis may be woven into your ethnographic sections or broken into distinct sections. Your own analysis should be fleshed out with comparisons, contrasts, insights, and analytical discussion drawn from other scholarly sources you found when doing your annotated bibliography.
6) A conclusion that briefly summarizes the high points of your argument, clearly and concisely restates the answer to your guiding question (i.e. your thesis statement), explains the stakes and broader implications of the study, and points to new questions or further directions for sociological research in this area.
How you sequence and blend these elements is up to you but it should be obvious what’s what. Study examples from the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography for possible organizational strategies. Each of these sections should be sewn together with strong transitional language that echoes the roadmap in your introduction. Each element builds upon the previous element and follows a clear logical sequence.
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