Your final project for this course will be an ethnographic research report based primarily on the data you have gathered during the term. Throughout the term, you will code and otherwise analyze your field notes; from this analysis you will write and submit a five-page memo presenting a particular theme that has emerged from your fieldwork. To prepare for your final paper, you should write a second memo (not to submitted), presenting a different theme that has emerged from your work. You will then edit, rework, and expand these two memos (the one you submitted and the one you wrote for yourself) into your final research paper, which will essentially constitute a presentation of two key (and perhaps related) themes that have emerged from your data. In short, you will be writing the final paper throughout the term.
Your final research paper should be structured largely as an expository essay. Although you have a little room to be creative, and I especially encourage you to provide vivid descriptions of your field site and participants, your paper must adhere to the following structure:
Briefly introduce your topic, including your site and the two themes that you intend to cover (roughly one half page)
Describe your field site (roughly one page). Here you need to provide some background information about the relevant features of your site, say a bit about your relation to your site, and briefly discuss the data you collected and how you got it – that is, your methodology. Keep your discussion of your method extremely brief – you will need to say much more about in your methodological appendix, described below.
Provide data and analysis presenting each of your two themes. This should constitute the bulk of your paper (roughly 6 pages) and be drawn primarily from the two memos you wrote earlier in the term (the one you submitted and the one you wrote for yourself).
Significance/concluding section (roughly one page). Here you should explain why what you’ve found is important, what the limitations of your work are (you will probably want to discuss this in terms of methodology), and what interesting (and relevant!) further questions remain.
Include a bibliography, listing all of the sources you cite (primarily in your methodological appendix).
Methodological appendix. In this section (roughly 2 pages) you need to describe how you conducted fieldwork, the type of data you gathered, how you gained access to your participants, and how you presented yourself to them. Discuss your role(s) in the field and the limitations associated with these. Also discuss the effect that you may have had on your data, and the effect that doing this fieldwork has had on you. In this section you will reflect on your fieldwork, its limitations, and what you have learned. Throughout this appendix I expect you to cite at least five of the course readings we’ve covered this term.
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