The Strange Research Paper

Showing Strangeness in the Everyday

A Research Assignment

This assignment requires you to broaden the topic beyond just one visual text to some larger cultural, social, or political issues raised by things that we can see around us.  This assignment emphasizes research skills, including library sources, interviews, and other forms of academic inquiry.

Your goal is to find something strange around us in our culture that may not be normally considered strange.  Give us a new perspective on some cultural practice that may be strange from an objective perspective, or an outsider.  You should begin with some kind of establishment for how you’re defining strange, create a stasis situation, and argue that your examples are strange with support.  Your argument should be constructed using both writing and images.  Using your own library and field research, make an argument that offers a new perspective on the nature of strangeness in the world around us.  In other words, show us something weird that we may not have considered weird before, such as—in a vaguely similar sense—the poem “A Martian Sends a Postcard Home” does.

So, you need to find at least 4 written sources that are from books, magazines, journals, or newspaper articles.  These sources have to have been printed somewhere in order to filter out some of the less carefully edited resources out there.  You might even research the history of the practice your critiquing.

In order to support your claim with some visual examples, you’ll need at least 1 picture that you’ve taken for this paper.   Show us what strange thing you’ve found and try to use photography to support your case.  Most likely you’ll be using your written sources to support the analysis of your photographic artifacts or objects of study. 

You must also include at least 4 other sources that are some other form of rhetoric.  These final examples might be an advertisement, a video, a song, a comic book, a statue, an interview, or something else. 

Also, I’d like you to push yourself to make your writing more formal and theoretical in this paper, so do not use “you” (though “I” is still okay).   You might even begin your paper with something such as, “I find the practice of applause strange” or “Keeping dogs indoors is weird.”

You need to use MLA format to cite your sources, but this time you may play with the formatting of your paper; you do not need to use Times New Roman.  The paper should be a minimum of 2000 words.

25% of Final Grade

First draft due: Week 11 Thursday, 11/8

Final draft due: Week 12 Tuesday, 11/15