Formulate Your Story Maps Research Question Exercise

This is a follow-up exercise to your in-class work on your group’s research question. Please complete the following steps as a group before Monday:

1. Create a Slack Channel for your Story Maps group. Add me to this channel. This way, you always have a channel of communication to me as a group.
2. On this channel, post the research question you all came up with as a group for your proposal outlines. Include at least a paragraph or two about the reasons for the group’s interest in the question, and address the following questions.
   • 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., Dar-Es-Salaam, Tanzania) or even a whole metropolitan region (e.g., the San Francisco Bay Area). Who are the other members of your group? Who was present for the discussions? What is your group’s research question?
   • 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?
3. Describe your answer to the question–your thesis, in other words–and why it should be considered interesting; be sure to make specific reference to the advice to be found in the Davis (1971) essay. Note that you don’t need to reach a consensus as a group as to how the question is to be answered: if there is no consensus, then each member of the group needs to explain how they intend to answer the question.

Below is a good example from a previous semester (note again, however, that it is not necessary for members to agree on their answer to the question):

“How has extreme hypermasculinity and gender inequality entered Swissbeatbox’s Grand Beatbox Battle in Warsaw, Poland, despite not only the beatbox community’s values against oppression, but Poland’s significant level of gender equality between males and females?”

This question has been revised from the previous question “How has hypermasculinity and gender segregation entered the German and international beatbox community despite the communities fundamental values against oppression and the more feminist state of Eastern Germany.” through recent events of sexual assault and drugging that took place last month during this competition. After this event occurred, many beatboxers and community members came out with their experiences with sexual assault during not only the event but in other beatboxing events too. Our group has concluded that there is more room for research and credible sources as many beatboxers have spoken out in response to this event. Not only have hours of content on YouTube been published, but many survivors and community members have come out with their stories and spoken out about the issue on social media.

After reviewing the reading by Murray S. Davis, we believe that this research question can be deemed “interesting” as it reflects Davis’ fourth part of his “Index of the Interesting”, called “Generalization” [Davis 1971:317] Part A states “What seems to be a local phenomenon is in reality a general phenomenon” which will reflect our research because this issue is not exclusive to just the Grand Beatbox Battle in Poland but all around the beatbox community during in-person and online events.

This assignment will count towards your class participation grade.

REFERENCES Davis, Murray S. 1971. ‘That’s Interesting! Towards a Phenomenology of Sociology and a Sociology of Phenomenology’. Philosophy of the Social Sciences 1(4):309-334. Retrieved 13 March 2022 (http://kieranhealy.org/files/misc/davis-thatsinteresting-1971.pdf).