Obesity in the United States and how that can lead to life threatening diseases.

Post your completed draft of the Autoethnography project here. Please post it as a Microsoft Word file, and not as a Pages file, or any other file.

Here, below, is the full assignment prompt we’ve been working from, which you received on day 1 of the unit. Check your work against it to make sure you’ve got everything you’re supposed to have as part of this draft.

Major Assignment #1: Auto-Ethnography

Specs:

Length: 2000+ words, not counting sources

Sources: 5+ peer-reviewed sources

2+ other sources of any kind

Notes from 1+ interview

Notes from 1+ observation

Format: Sections for Intro, Methods, Narrative, Discussion, & References

Citation Style: Chicago (Author-Date) Style

Draft Due: Monday, May 4 at 3 pm MST

Prompt:

Write part of an autoethnography in which you qualitatively research and report on a subculture that you participate in. In the process, say something new about this group that you didn’t already know. Your audience for this paper is university-level sociologists.

Format:

You’ll write the following sections as part of your auto-ethnography:

An Introduction that puts your research into scholarly context.
A Methods section that describes and justifies your interview/observation methods.
A Narrative section that tells the story of your research, relating findings from memories, interviews, and observations (and possibly diary entries).
A Discussion section that gives tentative analysis and suggests new research directions.
A References section cited in Chicago (Author-Date) style.

Elaboration:

In this project, you are both the researcher and part of the thing being researched. The thing being researched is a subculture. What’s a subculture? We’ll define subcultures early in the unit, but basically, it’s a group of people who identify themselves by some shared interest and set of activities. For example, “Bronies” are a subculture (Google it). Hardcore punk fans are a subculture. Vegetarians are a subculture. New Orleans Pelicans fans are a subculture.

So, then, you’re supposed to conduct research to better understand a subculture that you already participate in. That research should involve (1) reading existing academic research related to your project; (2) formulating a research question you want to answer about your subculture; (3) writing about how that research has affected your way of looking at your subculture; (4) observing that subculture in action online while taking notes on what you find; (5) interviewing some specific member of that subculture by Skype; (6) reflecting on and telling stories of your own experience of that subculture; and (7) presenting this information in a format like what you see described above, and like what you will see in samples we read in this unit.