Your paper must be in formal academic English, typed, double spaced, and 3000 words (with a +/-10%) in length (including footnotes and excluding bibliography). You must have a title page according to APA academic formatting, and your paper should also include section (and possible sub-section) headers and page numbers. Your paper should have an introduction where you describe your topic and associated research question, body sections where you describe your understanding of the biomedicalization toolkit and where you apply the toolkit to your case/topic, and a conclusion where you summarize your findings, acknowledge limitations and point to future research.
The topic of your final paper is for you to choose, but it must relate to an area of biomedicine, and it cannot be an exact topic/case we discussed in the course or the topic of your presentation. You will have developed research on a topic through your literature review, but you are not tied to that topic if you want to switch.
The goal of the paper is to explain how and why do we have a particular kind of biomedicine (enter your topic choice) that we do, and show how and why social and historical arrangements matter in shaping your chosen area of biomedicine.
Key to this paper is to explain your topic by way of the biomedicalization toolkit that we develop through the course.
Do you need to include research and writing on all three eras (i.e. Rise of Medicine, Medicalization and Biomedicalization)?
….Yes, No, and Maybe:
• Yes: Most analysis can’t explain where we are at now, without some reference to where we were.
• No: doing a detailed analysis of your topic across all three eras is likely to be too much.
• Maybe: you need to decide for yourself how best to present this, and deal with the historical nature of the course and of biomedicine.
Have a look at York’s new Student Papers & Academic Research Kit (SPARK) for tips on how to write a better research paper, and the Bethune Writing Center also available to you.
Assessment Criteria: The paper will be marked out of 30, and based on the following criteria:
· Timely submission (see below section on late submissions)
· Formal requirements (i.e. typed, double spaced, and word count, title page, section headers, page numbers, quality of English spelling and grammar)
· APA referencing
· Paper structure
· Quality of research question/ thesis
· Quality of argument and coherency
· Use of course concepts/ theories/ biomedicalization toolkit to critically examine your case/topic.
· Quality of conclusions
· Quality and number of sources/research to support your argument (i.e. minimum of 8 total sources, 6 sources external to course material )
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