Paper details:
Instead of simply handing in your Research Paper to me at the end of class, you will first submit the Research Paper, and then work to translate your findings
into an entry in our class’s shared Food Atlas.
The Food Atlas will be an online, digital website, exhibited by the UNB Library built with the Omeka open publishing platform creating and sharing digital
collections and media-rich exhibits.
For most of you, you will write a short, written, Food Atlas Entry. Some of you might want to do a digital poster, an illustration, a picture, a podcast, a video, a
graphic novel, etc. (If so, email me.) Your quarry is to translate your Research Paper into a Food Atlas Entry with a wider audience—be it friends, peers, family,
or future students.
Who is your audience?
Every piece of writing has an audience. The question to ask yourself is who is a piece of writing for? The audience, in part, defines the genre, the style, the
length, and the content of a piece of writing. Are you writing an email for a peer, a letter to a professor, a memo to a colleague, a complaint to a business, a
submission to a court, a research paper for a broad scientific community, a peer review for a specialist in your own research area, a piece of advice for a
graduate student, a political speech, a funeral eulogy, or a short article for a lay but intelligent general reader? Different audiences demand different styles,
forms, and length of writing.
In much of this course, your assignments have had as their primary audience yourself. I have asked you to write a prospectus, an annotated bibliography, and
an abstract and an outline. These documents had as their primary purpose to get you thinking and reading and writing and working out your idea, argument,
and thesis in pursuit of putting together a research paper to persuade the reader (e.g. me) of something supported by evidence that you were compiling.
How you wrote those assignments was, more or less, up to you, in negotiation with me. Your research paper is different. Its primary audience is not yourself,
but me, a scholar, an academic, and a professor attuned to spending part of each day in contemplative reading of research to glean insight and understand
evidence. Your research paper had as its audience me. Its genre was a student essay.
For your Food Atlas Entry, your final assignment instead of an exam, the audience is different. Here, your audience is a general reader—a non-specialist
reader, someone unfamiliar with the anthropology or sociology of food, and someone unfamiliar with your paper. Someone who does not know what you
have read, or what you are trying to say. But your reader is kind, and they are more or less willing to accept you as the expert. The point of your Entry is not to
convince this reader of your argument, so much as to share your substantive findings with them. Your reader will assume you know your stuff. So, your aim is
to communicate. Think of your Food Atlas Entry not as a report, but as an executive summary of a report. Your goal is to communicate your findings in as
concise and straightforward a way as possible. Your reader will have no specialized knowledge. They will be unfamiliar with your context, the wider research,
the location, or the theorists you rely on.
The challenge is one of translation. The challenge is to translate your Research Paper—a detailed, carefully argued, fully cited, persuasive exercise in
interpretative social science where you convince your reader of something by marshalling evidence—into a short entry that communicates a finding for a
wider audience. It is an exercise in communicating findings to the general reader, perhaps a friend, a lover, a peer, a family member, or someone else
interested in coffee, or paella, or farmers’ markets, or whatever it is you’ve written about.
What is the assignment?
The class Food Atlas will comprise a map, with about 44 entries.
Your entry will include your name, a snappy title, a short pithy descriiption, a location (for mapping, be as specific as you like. e.g. Thailand, or Bangkok,
Thailand, or Kor Tor Market, Bangkok, Thailand, or 13.797218321478265, 100.54769520256298), and a word file of you entry which should should be 500 to
600 words long.
Rather than a launch in the classroom or the library, as had been my plan, your Food Atlas entry is due on the last day of classes (Wednesday, April 13).
