Seminar Participation

​

This course will be a seminar style. The instructor may wax in and out of lecture mode as he shares ethnographic examples from his own research or tries to situate or explicate particular theoretical points, but student participation and rich discussion is critical. As a result, your participation in the seminar will constitute a substantial element of the final grade. The syllabus will include an array of reading and multi-media materials, and it is critical that you come prepared each session to discuss your take on the materials for each seminar discussion, including critical comments and questions for discussion. As the seminar develops, we may make miscellaneous on-the-fly assignments in order to gather more material for discussion and collective analysis, and it is also critical that all participants in the seminar undertake these activities, read and/or watch the assigned materials in good faith, and come ready to have an interesting discussion based on this material.

​

Paper

 

The only major assignment in the seminar will be to produce an original research paper. You need to provide your own, original, analysis of the topic that you researched. The specific topic for this final paper is up to you. This might include diving more deeply into a topic we covered in this course and doing additional research to flesh out that topic, or it might involve an investigation of a topic that we did not cover (or only covered in a cursory fashion) in the course readings and discussion. You may also collect primary data through social media or other archives relevant to Southeast Asia/Southwest China. The expected range for this final paper is 6,000-10,000 words. Be sure to clearly cite all of your sources, using the Chicago (Author-Date) citation format for in-text citations and your references cited list.

 

The paper will be graded for its content and style, evidence of your original research, and your overall analysis of some dimension of a phenomenon relevant to the region of Southeast Asia-Southwest China that extends beyond the content on the course syllabus. As you write the paper, make sure that you actually pose an argument at some level. It is best to think about the central thrust of the paper in terms of a research question, to which your paper provides the answer. This answer should be theoretical in the sense that it provides an argument that could be debated. In other words, take a stance, and defend that stance on the research question that guides the paper, based on the evidence that you muster from the literature or primary sources.

​

The final draft of the paper will be due by December 9 at 11:59pm. An ungraded full draft of the paper is also due by 11:59pm on October 21. This will provide me a chance to review the direction the paper is headed and provide critical feedback, suggestions for further research to include or consider, etc. It is also strongly encouraged that you visit with me during office hours in the very early stages of developing your paper idea. 

 

Both drafts should be turned in via Box, uploaded as a single-spaced PDF, beginning with a cover page that includes 1) your full name, 2) date, 3) the name of this class (ANTHR 327), 4) “Seminar Paper” followed by your title for the paper, and 5) a word count of the essay. The uploaded PDF filename should include your LastName_FirstName-LongPaper in the file name, as in the following example: “Hickman_Jacob-SeminarPaper.pdf”. Please add "DRAFT" to the filename of the ungraded draft, and please add "FINAL" to the filename of the final paper for grading.