Essay, exhibit, and presentation (Research essay)
- Default due date: 2025-11-06 17:00:00
- Points: 100
- Weight: 45%
- Length (in words): 3000
You are required to submit this assignment to pass the class.
Instructions
This class has a thesis: The idea of a network can inform a perspective one can apply to any area that social scientists want to study and explain. That is, thinking about networks does not limit one to examining one aspect or domain of social life such as technology, science, or technical systems. It is a way of seeing that allows us go beyond any set of facts to illuminate deeper truths about the world. Furthermore, the move from a study of systems and structures (and agency, action, and process) to networks is an example of a paradigm shift in anthropology and in the social sciences generally.
Your work in this class culminates in a project where you develop your understanding of a network perspective, your ability to explain how it informs other people’s work, and your own position on the answers people derive from applying it.
When this class was first proposed, it included a plan for a “research essay” that students would develop over the last half of the semester. Our class will not have a classic term paper or research essay. Instead, building on the in-class assignments from Weeks 8, 9, and 12, each student will prepare a 1500-word essay and exhibit in which they argue for their interpretation of three of the topics we have discussed in class. The short essay and exhibit will complement each other to support a single main claim about other people’s research in several different areas. At the end of class, each student will also give a 10-minute interactive presentation on their essay’s argument and their exhibits will be showcased.
tl;dr: The 3000-word “research essay” on the syllabus = 1500-word essay + exhibit (equivalent to 900 words) + interactive in-class presentation (equivalent to 600 words). Dessert is three desserts.
For your project, you should select three of the topics where the network perspective has influenced anthropology
- Studies of biomedicine, health, and welbeing
- Studies of scientific knowledge production and its relationships to society
- Studies of physical and communications infrastructures
- Studies of digital technology
- Disability studies
- Studies of human ecology and the environment
Not all of these have been equally represented in our class readings. For this project you should choose topics which we discussed in class. Most of your sources should be works we have discussed in class, or were assigned as supplemental readings, or are on the class bibliography. If you would like to incorporate sources outside of these, please talk to Ryan.
Part one: An essay concerning networks
The essay is the most important part of this project and is 66% of the project grade. (It is worth 30% of your final class grade.) While you will have a specific focus in this essay, it’s still an essay. You have one main goal: Say what you think.
Your essay should present a claim as an answer to an open question.
You should build an argument to support your claim by analyzing the work of three different ethnographic researchers working in three different areas.
(The question to which you are responding is “What is the most important theme connecting the work of three different scholars, and why is this theme important to each of these scholars?” This question is not as open as a typical research question might be, but nonetheless it is still important to think of your claim as an answer to an open question that can be answered in different ways.)
In this essay, I am pushing you toward a specific claim. Given the sources you have, a good argument would consist of stating your own definition of a network as an abstract concept, and then explaining how you derive this definition from the common elements you find in the thinking, reasoning, and conclusions of three different scholars.
Note: There is a separate, in-class assignment that leads up to your project submission. In Week 12, students will work in pairs to read each others’ drafts and give each other feedback. Although the final version of this essay is due in Week 13, you should still have a rough draft ready in time for class in Week 12. See the assignment instructions for the feedback exercise for more information.
How your essay will be evaluated
In addition to identifying an appropriate set of scholars working on different topics, this essay will be graded as a finished product that reflects your own thinking about what the scholars you choose have in common. These general grading criteria will be applied.
The overall goal of this essay is more important than any one specific grading criteria. Keep the overall goal in mind. In this kind of conceptual paper, your job is to play the role of teacher and explain other people’s ideas to a naive reader with no knowledge of this class.
For that reason, a good paper will not only clearly state a claim, it will build support for that claim by reinterpreting what other people have said about their ideas. A good essay will be able to state what an author’s ideas are without quoting them or summarizing their finer points. It will go beyond these details to draw out what you have identfied as the most important ideas these authors develop and convey what these ideas are and why you think they support your overall claim that they are part of a shared perspective (based on networks).
Part Two: Exhibiting your essay’s main claim and argument
The exhibit asks you to think creatively about how you communicate your ideas. This can take many forms, but ideally it will be a classic poster presentation in which create a visual text on A0 posterboard or paper sheet that someone can view to understand your main claim and the reasoning that leads you to it. Some alternatives1 are:
- A podcast episode of 10-15 minutes
- A single digital slide for projection on a screen
- An interactive digital object2:
- a web site
- a media-enriched, hypertext PDF file
- a text-based adventure game
- a text-based ELISA-style chatbot (or a fine-tuned LLM chatbot if you are an advanced HuggingFace superuser).
The exhibit is a supplement to your essay. It is worth 22% of your project grade (or about 10% of your final class grade). Keep that proportion in mind. The essay is 1.5 times more important than the exhibit. (It’s easy to get carried away with creative production and leave no room for work on writing and editing.)
Rather than let the exhibit distract you from the essay, use it as an opportunity to progress your argument in your essay. Why do we make posters or alternative media for presenting arguments in writing? Because when we are conveying complex reasoning at an abstract level, it can help to translate our ideas into different media and use a different channel of communication. As you consider different possible abstract claims about the common theme that unites disparate kinds of research, you can ask yourself,
- “How can I draw a diagram of the relationships among these ideas?”
- “What sorts of questions would someone ask about this when learning about it for the first time?”
- “What is the architecture of the logical structure I am building?
- “If my argument existed in space and time, how would a learner navigate it? How would they get through the maze?”
- “Is there a meme format for the reasoning behind my main claim? (And what would the alt text be for visually impaired readers?)”
- “What are the priority levels for all the different information, ideas, and claims I want to express? If I was Annemarie Mol writing The Body Multiple (2003), what would be my main text and what would be my running commentary text?”
- “What should people see on a Z-pattern or F-pattern scan of my exhibit and what should be available for them to drill down into?”
Thinking about your exhibit can in this way help you make decisions about how to organize your presentation of your ideas in a logical way in your essay.
How will an exhibit be evaluated
This will be subject to change and further discussion in class. You will not be graded on creativity or aesthetic sophistication or entertainment value of your exhibit (although the exhibit should be the product of care and attention to usability). Rather, expressing a single main idea in a way that anyone, even people with no knowledge of the topics or this class, can understand it will be the most important quality. The exhibit should also be faithful to your essay.
Part Three: An interactive oral presentation on your essay
The presentation is a short, informal talk each student will give to the class. In Week 13, the class session will be replaced with a presentation session. If necessary, we will add a second presentation session in Week 13 also. More details about the schedule of presentations will come later. Students should come to the presentation session at the beginning and stay for the whole time. The presentation will form 12% of the final project grade (or about 5.4% of the final class grade)
How your work will be evaluated
The presentations will consist of a 5-minute introduction followed by 5 minutes of questions from Ryan and the audience. The talk need only consist of (1) an introduction, (2) a statement of the scope of your paper and your central claim, and (3) a few examples that illustrate your claim. You can refer to your exhibit but the exhibit should also stand alone. It is more important to prepare for answering questions about your essay than to prepare for your talk. (And as you work on this project, imagine what questions you might get as a way to think through the steps in your argument.) While you will not be graded on mastery or expertise in your topic, your answers to questions should demonstrate how much you have thought about and developed a deep understanding of your own ideas and conclusions in your essay.
If you have concerns about speaking in class, please talk to me in office hours or in an appointment.
Can I use AI?
Parts One and Two of this assignment are open and unsupervised, so there is no restriction on using AI tools in an honest way to improve your writing or to aid in the creation of supplements to exhibit. Any use of an AI tool must be acknowledged. See the AI in Education Canvas site for tips on using AI tools and for how to acknowledge their use. When it comes to acknowledging tools, more is better. Documenting your use of AI tools is a way to demonstrate your own independent thinking.
There are several ways you can use AI tools for parts of this assignment:
- You can use an LLM chatbot in a role-play exercise in which it asks you questions about your ideas.
- You can ask an LLM chatbot to give you lessons on how to use diagram-making software.
- You can use an IDE with built-in code completion to create a web site (but taking care to test your code in a safe development environment before publishing it).
- You can use a grammar checker to suggest corrections or identify ways you can make your expressions clearer (like The Writer’s Diet).
Part Three is an in-class, interactive presentation. While you could use AI tools to prepare to give the presentation—for instance by speaking to a bot and asking it to ask you questions—you will be giving the presentation yourself with your own natural intelligence. Your grade on this presentation will be based on your answers to questions.
References
This is subject to further discussion in class after the midsemester break. Please discuss your ideas with Ryan. Most or all of these alternatives would be available for everyone to view or read online or on the class Canvas site, while the poster presentations would be presented in a special exhibit session of class.↩︎
Though not required, it is useful to learn about how to make multimedia accessible to people of different abilities. You can learn about multimedia accessibility from the Web Accessibility Initiative of the W3C.↩︎