Community Analysis

Paper 3: You will be writing a 4-6-page paper on a community profile (a common academic genre in the social sciences and in applied fields, such as health sciences), allowing space for you to undertake a form of ethnographic inquiry and to capture data in many forms. As you move through this unit, you will collect primary data from the conversations that take place within a community (face-to-face or mediated), to observations of movements and interactions and artifacts. You will analyze this data to come to rich conclusions about what it means to be an insider to a particular community.In other words, you will expand on your ability to step outside of yourself in your writing by researching a group or community that you know well, whose values/standards/beliefs/ perspectives on the world you find interesting and wish to understand better. That is, your goal will be to explore, analyze, and explain to someone else how a particular discourse community works, and how this community understands itself and its relationship to some aspect of the wider world. To do this well, you will have to try to set aside your own assumptions, opinions, and values for a time in order to see and try to understand the assumptions, opinions, and values of the group in its own terms. This project is not meant to be evaluative, meaning that you will have to suspend judgment about the group and its behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs. Whether you agree or disagree on some personal level with the group and its practices, it is irrelevant in this project. Instead, your focus should be on analyzing and explaining in sufficient detail how this group works, thinks, and acts so that someone completely unfamiliar with it can understand it and its members better. Thus, just as a cultural anthropologist might research the values, beliefs, and behaviors of members of a particular tribe, religious group, or organization as a way of understanding the variety of human experience, your goal is to provide insight into a particular culture/subculture that many people may not know about already.