Story Maps Proposal Outline Assignment

Each group member should be actively involved in discussing the layout of the group’s Story Map and selecting material to be incorporated. In addition, each group member must submit a proposal for the hip-hop related material — event, song, or hip-hop artist — she will cover, explaining how it relates to the group’s research question, and identifying the relevant sociological concepts that will be covered.

With respect to each student’s proposal outline, the ideal submission will pose a well-crafted and answerable research question, suggest an interesting thesis in answer, make specific reference to course readings (NOT the kind of strained reference that lazy students make just to tick a box); and specifically identify some useful sources of empirical data (quantitative and qualitative) that will enable you to forcefully argue for your thesis.

(An example of a hip-hop event might be the release of the music video for Childish Gambino’s ‘This is America’, or the opening night of the first gallery show featuring graffiti, or the birth of the breakdancing scene in Tokyo. An example of a hip-hop track worth analysing at length might be Kendrick Lamar’s ‘Alright’. An example of a hip-hop artist might be the producer J Dilla, or the rapper Slick Rick, or the graffiti artist Futura.)

Outline your individual contribution to this group project. In a 2-3 page 12-point font Google Doc (about 1,000 words for the introduction, body, and conclusion), describe your intended contribution to the group’s Story Maps assignment. 1,000 words is not a lot, so you should strive to use as much of the space you’re allotted as possible. As a general rule of thumb, if you only submit something that’s 900 words, you shouldn’t expect to receive anything higher than a 90. An 800-word paper is likely not worth more than 80 points, a 750-word paper no more than 75, and so on…

Use ASA Style for your in-text citations as well as for your reference list (yes, of course you need a reference list!). Make sure you’ve answered the following questions:

1. What is the geographical focus of your group’s study? Ideally, this will be neighbourhood-specific (e.g., the South Bronx; or Houston’s North Side; or Hollis, Queens), but it could also be a whole city, if that makes sense (e.g., Memphis, TN; or Dar-Es-Salaam, Tanzania) or even a whole metropolitan region (e.g., the San Francisco Bay Area).
2. Who are the other members of your group? (PS: Your group must create a Slack channel for your Story Maps group and add me to this channel. That way, you always have a line of communication to me as a group.)
3. What is your group’s research question?
4. How does this research question meaningfully connect to at least one key concept, theme, or theory—a keyword, in short—from our reading or class discussions? In the ideal case, you will also be able to connect this keyword in some substantive way to your material (event, song, or artist) and the map location you have chosen. (This means that you should be citing at least one of the assigned texts; you must also snowball backwards from this source to at least one extracurricular [that is, non-assigned] source.)
5. For your contribution to the group project, what is the hip-hop event, track, or artist that you’ll be studying?
6. Why did you choose this event, track, or artist?
7. How does this choice relate back to your group’s research question?
8. What is your thesis (that is, what is the main claim)?
9. Why is it interesting? Remember that Murray S. Davis argues that an interesting claim is one that denies some bit of conventional wisdom, or subverts the reader’s expectations in some fundamental way. ‘The student’, he concludes, ‘should learn that he [sic] must always take into account the assumption of his audience about a topic before asserting his own theory about this topic. The more clearly he can specify his audience’s assumption, the more strikingly he will be able to attack it. This denial of a clearly understood audience assumption is the essence of the interesting’ (Davis 1971:337-38).
10. What are some meaningful locations you might map in your chosen geographical area, and why are they significant? You must ‘drop a pin’ on at least two sites, at least one of which must be within this area; but you are welcome to map additional sites inside and outside of this area. (E.g., the graf writers’ bench discussed in Chang 2012; or the gallery that put on the show that introduced graffiti to an art world audience; or a specific street corner or housing project name-checked in the lyrics to a famous song; or a public space where dance crews rehearsed or battled.)
11. What quantitative data will you utilise in your analysis? Examples of quantitative data include survey statistics on ethnicity, class, gender, education, demographic changes, or the music industry; statistical reports; etc.
12. What qualitative data will you utilise in your analysis? Examples of qualitative data include interviews, reviews (as examples of critical reception, or as support for analytical claims), music/dance videos, images (e.g., graffiti, album artwork, or promotional flyers), lyrics, vocal and instrumental samples, etc.

Refer to This Checklist Before Submission

• Have I thoroughly answered all of the questions above?
• Are all of my in-text citations formatted correctly in ASA style? (In addition to the ASA Quick Style Guide hyperlinked above, this video covers much of the same ground and also provides instruction on citing videos.)
• Have I included a reference list, also formatted in ASA style?
• Does that reference list include a ‘snowball’ reference?
• Have I indicated clearly which reference is my snowball?
• Have I indicated clearly where I snowballed from?
• Finally: Is all of this written up in a Google Doc?
  • Have I copied a shareable link from this document?
  • Have I made sure that anyone with the link has access and editing privileges?
  • Have I submitted this link in the appropriate place on Blackboard?

You can decode my grading comments here. It would be a good idea to look at this post before you submit your proposal so that you can anticipate various criticisms that I might make of your work (and seek to avoid them!).

REFERENCES

Chang, Jeff. 2012. ‘Zulus on a Time Bomb: Hip-Hop Meets the Rockers Downtown’. In Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal, eds., That’s the Joint! The Hip-Hop Studies Reader, 2^nd Ed. New York: Routledge.  

Davis, Murray S. 1971. ‘That’s Interesting! Towards a Phenomenology of Sociology and a Sociology of Phenomenology’. Philosophy of Social Science 1(4):309-344.