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.