Belkin "No Place to Hide: Colleges Track Students, Everywhere; Schools use Tech to Follow Students Online, on the Quad and in the Football Stadium."

Austen "'A Mass Invasion of Privacy' but No Penalties for Tim Hortons"

Explore a topic intended for an educated but non-specialist audience. You might think of this assignment as the first step in writing a full research paper, conducting library research and analyzing/organizing your sources The first step is to define your topic, write several research questions, and conduct library research to understand what others have said about these questions. In this research, you will also identify evidence you could use to take a position on your topic or identify gaps in the published literature that you or someone else should fill. As you read through your sources, analyze them (audience, purpose, genre, and context) and keep track of where your sources are similar and where they are different. When you find sources that speak to one another through citation, wonderful, and these articles may be especially useful to you in understanding the topic and the wider context in which it exists.

 

Your paper should be organized as follows (but do not use section headings). Your first section will function as an introduction describe your topic, explain your research questions, and discuss the relevance of your topic (why is it important, who might care about it, and how actively are researchers and others writing about it).

 

Your second section will be a presentation of your research, and you'll lead us through your sources by summarizing them and explaining how they are part of the scholarly conversation: who is involved, what are they saying, and how do these voices relate to one another? Your analysis of the sources will be particularly helpful in this section. 

 

Your third section will function as an extended conclusion in which you imagine The contours of a larger research paper that could be produced from your topic exploration. What are the positions that someone could take in this imaginary research paper, and do any of those positions seem particularly compelling to you? How would this imaginary research paper add to the
existing scholarly conversation in your research sources? What additional research would be valuable for this imaginary research paper if time allowed? For example, would more research on adjacent topics be useful, or would you recommend primary research to collect new data, such as surveys, interviews, or observational studies?