Interdisciplinary Research in African Studies: Graduate Writing Seminar

16: 016 :502 3 credits

Barbara Cooper

bacooper@rci.rutgers.edu

Monday 9:50-12:50, Van Dyck 011

Office Hours: prior to class in Van Dyck 003 by appointment only

This course is designed to help students working on writing projects in African Area Studies to draft and polish writing at a variety of stages in their graduate careers. Because work in African studies is interdisciplinary and demands fieldwork (often in another language), students need a great deal of support learning about writing and fieldwork conventions that may not be available in their home departments.

At the opening of the course students will explore the history of discourses about Africa as a subject of academic enquiry in order to expose them to debates about the political, moral and epistemological legacies of African Studies. Students will begin to locate their own research and writing projects within the history of the shifting and contested landscape of knowledge construction on Africa. The course will encourage students to reflect upon the implications of different models for the construction of knowledge about Africa (including area studies, cultural studies, Africana studies, international studies, and comparative thematic research) for their own research, audience, teaching, and potential collaborative partners. Students will identify a writing project they want to work on in the course by the third week of classes. Projects may include prospectuses, grant applications, dissertation chapters, conference proposals and papers, and articles for publication. Each student will make an oral presentation of the proposed work, submit written drafts for consideration by the entire class, respond to commentary from classmates for revision, and provide commentary for their classmates. A few guest speakers well situated to shed light on particular problems may be invited in to speak.

Graduate students will benefit from seeing their own work and the work of others at various stages from proposal development to fieldwork to write-up. They will gain exposure to research across the range of African Studies disciplines. Finally they will benefit both from receiving and learning to draft constructive peer review–an important part of professional life. Students’ work will be evaluated upon the strength of the final writing project, their oral and written contributions to peer review, and their participation in class discussion more broadly. Students who have taken the course in one year are welcome to sit in on the class in subsequent years. Students outside the Certificate Program are also welcome to register for the course.

Texts for the course (available in the Rutgers Bookstore):

Wayne C. Booth et al. The Craft of Research (2^nd Edition) (University of Chicago Press, 2003).

Carolyn Keyes Adenaike and Jan Vansina, eds. In Pursuit o History: Fieldwork in Africa (Heinemann1996).

Lyn Schumaker. Africanizing Anthropology: Fieldwork, Networks, and the Making of Cultural Knowledge in Central Africa (Duke, 2001).

Howard S. Becker. Writing for Social Scientists: How to Start and Finish Your Thesis, Book, or Article (University of Chicago, 1986). [These readings are also on e-reserve but you may want your own copy of this useful book]

Other readings are available on e-reserve or as handouts

September 13: Introduction to course:

Reading: Becker, Howard. 1986. Writing for Social Scientists. Chicago: University of Chicago

Press. Chapter 1: Freshman English for graduate students, pp. 1-25.

In class exercise #1: Thinking about kinds of writing, kinds of audiences and the writing process itself. Take 15 minutes to write freely from the following prompts:

Why write anyway? To write well you need to find your passion and know who your audience is. What are some examples of models of writing that you admire and can imagine trying to emulate? What kinds of questions do you think are worth asking? Who do you want to speak to, speak back to, engage with? What does the phrase “important work” mean to you; is importance related to utility, relevance, significance, social/political engagement, truth?

What does interdisciplinary work mean to you? Is it a question of method–crossing disciplines? Is it a question of audience–speaking across borders? Is it a question of collaboration–sharing complementary skills? Or is African Studies a discipline in its own right with its own conventions?

In class exercise #2:

Write some notes to me about what you hope to accomplish in the way of your own writing in this course. If you are to set your own goals, what kind of writing are you interested in working on here?

(Examples might include conference proposals, papers, presentations; a research paper; dissertation proposals and funding applications; fieldwork writing and write-up tips; moving towards publication of articles, chapters, or a full monograph; etc.)

September 20: meet in Alexander at 9:50 IHL 413

Maximizing our impact in the library

Reading: Booth et al. The Craft of Research, 35-107.

Much of this may seem rather elementary to you, since you have all done research papers at some point in your careers. But in my experience even quite sophisticated students often spin their wheels because they have not identified a workable research problem and are not prepared to explain to a librarian what their project is. Please read these chapters and take a preliminary stab at articulating the kind of problem you are working on and come to our meeting with a brief paragraph that you can use to work with Lourdes Vasquez, the African Studies librarian, to work effectively with the resources we have at Rutgers.

September 27

External funding sources and the dissertation research process

Reading: download and read Michael Watts’ essay, “The Holy Grail: in Pursuit of the Dissertation proposal” at the Berkeley dissertation workshop website: http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/DissPropWorkshop/process/

You may also enjoy exploring the site a bit to get a feel for how if might be useful for you.

Guest speaker: Teresa Delcorso (Chaser) will be talking about how to identify likely fieldwork grants in African Studies, strategies for looking for more focused grants, ideas about writing proposals, what to do to fund write up, and the resources she can offer through her center.

October 4^th

Understanding the Proposal Review Process

Guest speaker: Angelique Haugerud

Readings: Some of your fellow students have been kind enough to share recently funded proposals. Read through the sample proposals by Katie Keller, Marc Shur, Jessica Libove-Morales, and Julie Silva.

For our discussion in the second part of class about the politics of research please also read Ginsburg, M., Adams, D., Clayton, T., Mantilla M., Sylvester, J. and Wang, Y. “The politics of linking educational research, policy, and practice: The case of improving educational quality in Ghana, Guatemala and Mali,” in Lumumba-Kasongo, Tukumbi (ed.). Dynamics and Policy Implications of the Global Reforms at the End of the Second Millennium. Leiden: Brill, 2000, pp. 27-47

[You may also want to seek out and read: Frederick Klaits, A research proposal funded by the Social Science Research Council: creating parenthood and childhood in Botswana in the time of AIDS. Africa Today, 44 : 3, 1997, 327-337 There are other funded proposals you can find via the Berkeley site.]

October 11

The Culture of Fieldwork

Reading: Lyn Schumaker, Africanizing Anthropology. Be prepared to discuss the whole book–obviously this will entail some strategic reading!

October 18

Roundtable on Fieldwork Post 9/11

Reading: Adenaike and Vansina, In Pursuit of History: Fieldwork in Africa (read through the whole book, choose chapters that interest you).

Roundtable participants to include: Julie Silva, Julie Livingston, David Hughes, Dillon Mahoney, and Erin Augis, Ellen Foley, Rick Schroeder, Cati Coe.

October 25

Life and Literature

Readings:

Becker, Howard. 1986. Writing for Social Scientists. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Chapter 4, “Editing by ear,” pp. 68-89 and Chapter 8, “Terrorized by the literature,” pp. 135-149

Vansina, Jan. 1994. Living With Africa. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press., 3-39. on e-reserve.

Each member of the class should come to class with a draft of a paper to be presented at the ASA or a comparable conference.

November 1

Knowing when you’ve made your case: Making Compelling Arguments

Booth et al., 111-181.

November 8

Making Professional Presentations

We will practice making oral conference presentations.

Booth et al, 185-240.

November 15

Thinking about evidence: Qualitative approaches

Seale, Clive. 1999. The Quality of Research. London: Sage Publications. Chapter 1: “Why quality matters,” pp. 2-28

November 22

Thinking about evidence: Quantitative approaches

Booth et al. 241-282.

November 29

The Ethics of Research

Renzetti, Claire and Lee, Raymond. (eds.). 1993. Researching Sensitive Topics. London: Sage Publications. Renzetti, C., and Lee, R. “Disseminating sensitive research findings: Structural and Personal Constraints,” pp. 229-234; Brink, P. “Studying African women's secret societies,” pp. 235-248.

Check the Rutgers Institutional Review Board guidelines on Human Subjects Research on the ORSP site http://orsp.rutgers.edu/Human.asp

December 6

Thinking like an Editor

Charles M. Bonjean, “A Quest for Interdisciplinary Scholarship,” in Editors as Gatekeepers: Getting Published in the Social Sciences edited by Rita J. Simon and James J. Fyfe (Rowman & Littlefield Pubs., Inc., 1994, 107-136.

Carol S. Appel, “University Press Editing and Publishing,” in Editors as Gatekeepers: Getting Published in the Social Sciences edited by Rita J. Simon and James J. Fyfe (Rowman & Littlefield Pubs., Inc., 1994, 179-194

Richard C. Rowson, “A Formula for Successful Scholarly Publishing: Policy-Oriented Research and the Humanities,” in Editors as Gatekeepers: Getting Published in the Social Sciences edited by Rita J. Simon and James J. Fyfe (Rowman & Littlefield Pubs., Inc., 1994, 195-208.

December 13

Final student presentations