This is the prompt for the paper which is an annotated bibliography ….
Your final paper must be 6-8 pages in length, not including your Works Cited page.
You must use at least four scholarly research sources (i.e. peer-reviewed articles from the library databases) and at least onetext from our class. This means that the minimum source requirement for this paper is 5sources; however, you are free to use additional pieces, and can feel free to draw on additional sources as well.
You must cite all sources properly using MLA Style for in-text citation. Please include a Works Cited page.
Description:
In this paper, you will closely examine a piece of media from and the role it plays in the culture at large. This should be a TV show, a news program, a music video, a particular artist or filmmaker, a movie, a radio program, etc. from the LAST *5 years* (e.g. release no longer than 2017). You should ask yourself these questions: How is this particular media shaping our culture? What discussions is it media prompting in politics, schools, churches, or our culture at large? How is it being used to challenge (or maintain!) certain stereotypes? How is it being used to change people’s belief systems? Or, how is it used to enforce certain beliefs and ideologies? What does this particular media teach us about how to be men, women, Black, white, young, old, American? Keep in mind that these are big and complicated questions, but you should be relatively specific in your analysis. For instance, if you believe that popular television is being used to challenge limited representations of masculinity in the media, you should be very specific: choose a specific TV show and be very exact in your claim of what kind of representation it is.
Over the years I have seen students write compelling analyses of major news programs, book series, TV shows, advertisements in popular magazines, online commercials, etc. The choice is yours! Please be creative and engage a topic that is most interesting to you! Just make sure its release/start date is from about 2017 + onward. While there is certainly a lot of interesting media prior to this era, I request the last 5 years so that we are analyzing media that is relevant to the current moment. The point is not to write a historical media paper; your goal here is to analyze how a particular cultural artifact reflects, shapes, challenges, reinforces, etc. the values of the contemporary moment.
Much like Paper #2, your goal in Paper #3 is to devise entirely your argument about your chosen subject, using both course materials and research sources to support your idea. Regardless, Paper #3 requires that you present a clear, informed position on a narrowly-defined topic of your choice. Remember: these are some questions you might ask yourself as you develop your thesis statement.
Note: It has been brought to my attention that students often write some version of a media analysis paper in other classes across the college (or perhaps even in high school). This MUST be an original paper—with an entirely new topic!—written for this class. If I discover that you have ‘recycled’ a paper, you will automatically fail the course.
Review the advice given about finding a topic and writing a research proposal from the Assignment for Paper #2, as that advice applies to this assignment as well. The only difference here is that the paper should be a bit more complex than Paper #2, and you will need one additional research source as a result. Remember, research is not only a matter of finding a fact or a “perfect” source. Research for this paper may be that you collect several perspectives on a topic and then your argument is to make sense of why there are these different perspectives.
I’ll attach the proposal below.
