Discourse Community Ethnography Assignment

Discourse Community Ethnography Assignment For this paper, you will select an identifiable group of people that operates online and whose participants differ from you in a significant way (in terms of our humanities topics: race, class, nationality*, gender, or sexuality. You should spend a significant amount of time observing this group and, on the basis of your observations and readings on discourse communities, write a paper in which you argue that the group either is or is not a discourse community. *“nationality” isn’t in our humanities topics but I’m putting that in as a possibility as well. What is ethnography? “ethnos” = “people, nation, class, caste, tribe; a number of people accustomed to living together” “graphia” = “description of,” particularly a written description Essentially, ethnography is a form of empirical, qualitative research that attempts to explore cultural phenomena, and in so doing shed light on the knowledge, values, and dynamics of a cultural group. What is discourse? Depends on who you ask! But basically, discourse is the idea of conversation happening within a given context or via a given method/channel/modality. How do researchers observe discourse? Typically, through Field observations Interviews Surveys In our case, your “observation” will consist of reading the texts produced by an online group of people; these texts may be written, or pictorial, or visual, or video-based. Depending on the group you choose to study, you may have the option of conducting in-person interviews, or you may be able to talk to your research subjects online, either through the medium of their community or via some other channel. What is a discourse community? This also varies slightly depending on who you ask, and we’ll examine it further in later lectures, but basically a discourse community is a group of people who are in some way defined by using a form of discourse that differs in a substantial way from the discourse used by the society around them. Not all groups are discourse communities, as we shall see, and not all people that employ a form of discourse can be said to belong to a particular group, as we shall see in upcoming discussions. Paper requirements: --A concise, specific thesis that encapsulates how your community of choice accomplishes its discourse. --A well-considered determination of whether the group is a discourse community or merely a group defined by some other factor. --Observations that reflect a prolonged and careful examination of your subject, and which constitute the bulk of the material in your paper. --A substantial contribution—tell your readers something they don’t already know, and that they wouldn’t be able to easily guess. --Self-awareness—an indication that you know how your own perspective colors your interpretation of the group you observe. --Five full pages, as before, not counting the Works Cited page. --Three sources, which will not be the primary focus of your paper but which you should use to support the claims you make based on your observations; they do not need to be academic, but they should still be as credible and authoritative as they need to be.