Collaborate with your group on a formal research study of national and international response(s) to one of the refugee situations explored in class. Situations you can examine include: the current crisis in Syria; Jewish refugees in WWII (as talked about in our first week in class); the many groups of refugees in Clarkston, GA; refugees of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zaire (Ch. 5 of Outcasts United); refugees of the Rwandan genocide (Ch. 6 of OU); Somali Bantu refugees (Ch. 3 of OU); and Liberian refugees and the attacks on Morovia (Ch. 2 of OU).
You can also examine questions of women, gender, and sexuality by examining Virginia Woolf’s time period (early twentieth-century/Women’s Suffrage in the U.S. and England); the role of gender in professional sports (Jen Welter articles and Luma’s role as a coach in OU); or Jordanian women’s roles in the public sphere (OU and Sweis article).
In this paper, you and your partner are to identify how the national and/or international communities discovered and responded to these issues. Questions you can consider (you do not have to answer all of these questions):
How did these groups of people call for help or aid (if they did so)?
How does this country’s or culture’s literacy rate or level of education impact these people’s ability to call attention to their plight?
Do literacy sponsors have a role in how these people were able to express themselves?
Does the media outside the country depict them in a sensationalized or exoticized way?
What medium did they employ to get their message across (examples: the internet; newspapers and journalism; large foreign powers, like the United Nations or that group’s respective embassies)? Why does this medium matter?
Were most people in this group dissuaded or prevented from writing about this issue to people outside their country? How?
How did their use of this medium affect their message – was it rushed or hurried in some way? Did it help them reach a larger audience, or did it limit the scope of their message?
How did the U.S. depict this situation? Did members of the media or government ally themselves with a particular power? Was critical information redacted (removed or censored by an authority) or not shown to an audience? Did the media depict it in some way that lessened the severity of the situation?
What rhetorical devices do different texts use to persuade the reader to their cause/convince the reader that the texts are correct?
Research Materials
You and your partner(s) will utilize a minimum of five separate sources for this paper. One of these sources must include a text from the second unit of the class (Sweis; Woolf; the online links about Syria and Jen Welter; St. John; Einstein). Two of these sources must be academic, scholarly articles, reviews, or studies in peer-reviewed journals (most easily located using the search functions in libinfo.uark.edu and Google Scholar). Two of these sources can be magazine, newspaper, blog, or other popular sources that speak to your issue.
What Makes It Good?
An introductory paragraph with a clear, directly stated thesis and detailed “essay map” outlining your main points in the order you will discuss them in your paper.
Well-crafted body paragraphs that follow the MEAL plan: 1) Main Idea/Topic Sentence(s) stating that paragraph’s argument; 2) Evidence that is correctly cited and fluidly introduced and which strongly backs your main idea; 3) Analysis explaining how that evidence is a strong example or counter-example of your argument; 4) Link/Transition underlining how the ideas in the paragraph correspond to ideas in the next paragraph and your overall thesis.
A conclusion in which you (briefly) remind the reader of the main points of your paper and answer the “So what?” question – why does your argument matter? Does it speak to larger issues about which the reader should be aware or should do further research? Does it make the reader think of a topic in a new way?
A gripping, interesting, or descriptive title designed to grab the reader’s attention.
Cooperative, supportive, thoughtful, and respectful work with your partner(s).
A complete and correctly formatted Works Cited page and correctly formatted in-text citations.
Readable, fluent prose; editing and proofreading that keep the paper from distracting readers with typographical errors and unclear sentences
Documenting Sources
Use one documentation style (in this case, MLA) consistently to attribute information and expression of ideas to your sources. Every time you quote or paraphrase from the sources provide the corresponding parenthetical citation. The last page of your essay should be a “Works Cited” page, which, as the name indicates, lists the sources to which you made reference in your essay. Cases of plagiarism will be reported to Academic Integrity, with no exceptions.
Minimum page length: 5 pages
Conferences: September 29th-October 4 (bring first two pages and list of sources you will use)
Drafting Day: Monday, October 5th (bring first 3.5 pages)
Due date: Monday, October 12th; Electronic Copy to SafeAssign 30 minutes before class
Grade value: 15% (150 points)
