This is the topic for your final project.
- You will research a subculture of which you are NOT a member, an insider. You may know people who are insiders, and of course your curiosity and even some knowledge about the subculture might be assumed, but you want to be examining this from the outside.
As you will see, this connects to the text we will be using, Fieldworking. The array of options is vast. You also might work on a musical or dramatic organization, a business, an organization like Americorps, a sports organization, or a church or religious group. You might work on the history of an area as a place to start--you would explore how the land (farms? coal mines?) is part of the subculture who lived there. You could work on a recurring event associated with a group (like Motocross or the World Series) as a way into a subculture. Interpret this liberally: Zollo's essay on the truck stop (which we will read in Fieldworking) is an example of this kind of essay which developed out of a personal interest, using the location as a way in to understanding the subculture of truckers.
One way to look at this which I encourage is to explore a subculture connected to your family history. This can turn into a family history project. How about the subculture of the of men who flew bombers over Europe in WW2, or of people who lived in Philadelphia in the 1930s? How about a union a family member has been part of? If you focus on a person as way into a subculture, you could study a person who might have been through the steel or coal industry, lived (and maybe died) in a war, changed careers or lifestyle in a remarkable way, raised a huge family, or so on.
The first part of term will be devoted to narrowing your topic down, but you should have a good idea by the third week of class.
Here are some more topics chosen by students which have great possiblity:
- a piece of land on which a mining town once existed, to explore the subcommunity of miners
- a person's grandfather who fought in a bomber squadron during WWII
- a former slave family's migration from the south to Pittsburgh
- a grandmother's childhood in the Depression
- a family friend who was adopted and searching for birth parents
- the steel drum and its cultural importance to the culture of Trinidad and Tobago
- basketball in New York City
- being handicapped
All of these are rich topics because they all connect someone's lived, personal experiences (living in a mining town, moving across states, being poor, surviving combat, playing music, growing up) to instances of culture, identity, and history (the Depression, the WWII air war, divorce, race) which allow you to make sense of the experience. They also leave much evidence behind (mining implements, photos of a bomber crew, songs, family photographs). Fieldworking describes the space where this interaction between personal experience and the greater community takes place as a "subculture" (see Fieldworking 1-6).
Pick a topic which has many connections. A good example will have places, people, objects, and texts associated with it. Weak topics will be less rich in means of access. Their scope is also more limited. They try just to tell a simple history ("the history of the Steelers") or a simple description of a person you like ("why my grandmother is a great grandmother"). Weak topics promise just data, or just opinion.
You may work collaboratively on the final project; if you want to work with someone else, you two will turn in a project twice as long, and will share the grade. You may also include work in other media aside from writing--on cd, the web, on video, etc. Talk with me individually about this to make sure that I can access it. Other media you submit should not simply be recordings of outside resources you have used, but should be your own interpretive work done in a different medium.
See the Course Calendar and the Papers page for information about format, due dates, and grading.