Uc Berkeley Ethnic Studies Ethnic Studies Project

Topic is all about “Martin Luther King Jr.”

• The final assignment for this course requires you to write an analytical essay (approximately 4-6 pages in length) about someone who would fit within the subject matter of an Ethnic Studies course. The analysis will situate their experiences within the larger racial/ethnic and other community/ies of which they were/are part.
• This assignment is NOT just a biography. It is biographical in nature, but you will do much more than simply recount events in this person’s life. If you find yourself thinking through and/or writing this assignment like a biography that just retells this person’s life, stop immediately and read the instructions again. This assignment requires you to further analyze your subject and their primary source(s) beyond a chronicle of their life. Rather, your goal for this assignment is to demonstrate how your subject reflected and/or differed from their community group context(s) and why this is important to understand in relation to that/those community group context(s) and Ethnic Studies more broadly.
• A primary source is a text, photograph, audio/video recording, oral testimony, or other sort of record that was created by someone who was there. You will need to include at least one substantial autobiographical primary source in your analysis; examples of the substantial primary source for this assignment include but are not limited to memoirs, oral history interviews, theater plays, paintings, music, photographs, or other produced works that your subject themselves took part in creating.
  • An example of a primary source that would work well for this assignment could be a diary of a campesino who fled Mexico during the Mexican Revolution or a poem written by a Filipina migrant worker in late 1800s Seattle, Washington.
  • Situating (aka contextualizing) the person you chose for this assignment means that you are demonstrating how this person’s experiences reflect those of their community/ies and/or are unique from experiences common within those community/ies. So, if you were writing about Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, you would situate him in your paper in terms of the Samoan diaspora in the United States or Black Canadian Americans or mixed-race Afro-Oceanian Americans or whichever community context(s) are relevant.
    • Note: you CANNOT write your paper on Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, even though he does have a New York Times best-selling autobiography that would count as a substantial primary source for the purposes of this assignment.
  • I have provided a sample list of online resources for oral histories and interviews at the end of this handout. You can also find such materials at the special collections at Hayden Library, on the ASU Libraries website, in the library stacks, and through various Google searches.
• Included in your analysis beyond the “4 W’s” (who, what, when, where) should be the “so what?” question (i.e. why is person’s experiences significant to understanding the experiences of their community/ies and Ethnic Studies as a whole?).
• You are required to have at least three secondary sources for your Final Project that help situate the primary source and person you have chosen. At least two of them must be substantial, scholarly secondary sources. A secondary source is a text, etc., that was created by someone after the fact who was not there. These are most commonly monographs (focused book-length studies) and scholarly journal articles. I will not count encyclopedia entries as scholarly secondary sources for this assignment, even if reputable scholars have written the entries. Research databases available through the ASU Libraries website to search for scholarly journal articles include JSTOR and Academic Search Premier. For more about primary and secondary sources, see:
  • http://www.asu.edu/lib/tutorials/primary/index.htm (Links to an external site.)
  • http://libguides.asu.edu/primarysources (Links to an external site.)
  • http://guides.library.ucsc.edu/primarysecondary (Links to an external site.)
  • http://libguides.asu.edu/content.php?pid=6321&sid=43856 (Links to an external site.)
• You will need to provide a thesis statement toward the end of the first paragraph of your essay that makes some sort of interpretive or argumentative point and gives the reader a general idea of what the rest of your essay will discuss.
• Please pay close attention to the specific chronological and temporal contexts of the person you are analyzing. For example, if you wanted to write about former basketball player Yao Ming moving from China to Houston, Texas as a migrant who represents the globalization of entertainment, using secondary sources about Chinese migrants to mid-1800s San Francisco, California would not work very well in terms of contextualizing Ming’s experiences.
• Formatting and Guidelines:
  • You are required to use some form of professional citation formatting for this essay. You can choose which style you would like to use (Chicago, MLA, APA) but must be consistent with it.
  • Your Final Project must be approximately 1,200 to 1,800 words in length (~4-6 pages, double-spaced 12-point font). This length requirement is not super strict, but anything egregiously short (e.g. 500 words) or long (e.g. 3,000 words) will have points taken off the grade.
  • You must upload your files in .doc , .docx , or .pdf format. Failure to do so will result in a loss of some points for formatting.
  • All of your work must be your own. TurnItIn will run everything through plagiarism checks. The academic integrity policy from the Syllabus applies for both assignments. If you are not sure whether or not to cite something, go ahead and cite it. It is better to be overly cautious than to not cite everything that you need.
  • If you have further questions, feel free to email me. Have fun and be creative with this!

  (Brief) List of Online Oral History/Autobiographical Writing Resources:ASU Libraries Online Guideshttp://libguides.asu.edu/c.php?g=263790&p=1762128 (Links to an external site.)http://libguides.asu.edu/c.php?g=263848&p=1762400 (Links to an external site.)UCLA Center for Oral History ResearchAsian American Historyhttp://oralhistory.library.ucla.edu/Browse.do?coreDescCvPk=95080&Subject=Asian%20American%20History (Links to an external site.)Iranian Jewish Oral History Projecthttp://oralhistory.library.ucla.edu/Browse.do?coreDescCvPk=29516&Subject=Iranian%20Americans (Links to an external site.)Latina/o Oral History collectionshttp://oralhistory.library.ucla.edu/Browse.do?coreDescCvPk=27908&Subject=Latina%20and%20Latino%20History (Links to an external site.)University of Texas, El PasoBracero History Archivehttp://braceroarchive.org/ (Links to an external site.)Digital Commons @ UTEP, General Interviewshttp://digitalcommons.utep.edu/gen_interviews/ (Links to an external site.)South Asian American Digital Archivehttps://www.saada.org/ (Links to an external site.)Seattle Labor History & Civil Rights Projecthttp://depts.washington.edu/civilr/ (Links to an external site.)Harvard University Library Open Collections Programhttp://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/immigration/ (Links to an external site.)University of Miami LibrariesCuban Heritage Collectionhttp://library.miami.edu/chc/collections/digitalcollections/ (Links to an external site.)Minnesota Historical SocietyMinnesota Immigrant Oral Historieshttp://collections.mnhs.org/ioh/ (Links to an external site.)Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, Regional Oral History CollectionJapanese American Confinement Siteshttp://bancroft.berkeley.edu/ROHO/projects/jacs/index.html (Links to an external site.)USC Asian American Studieshttp://libguides.usc.edu/asianamericanstudies/archives (Links to an external site.)UC Berkeley Ethnic Studies Library Asian American Studies Collectionhttp://eslibrary.berkeley.edu/asian-american-studies-collection (Links to an external site.)UC Berkeley Asian American Studies Digital Collectionshttp://guides.lib.berkeley.edu/asianamericanstudies/digitalcollections (Links to an external site.)South Asian American Digital Archivehttps://www.saada.org (Links to an external site.)Southeast Asian Archivehttps://seaa.lib.uci.edu (Links to an external site.)Houston Asian American Archive Oral Historieshttps://haaa.rice.edu (Links to an external site.)Oregon Multicultural Archives: Asian American People and Culturehttps://guides.library.oregonstate.edu/oma/asian-american (Links to an external site.)University of Washington East Asian Primary Source Guidehttp://guides.lib.uw.edu/c.php?g=582886&p=4024540 (Links to an external site.)University of Washington Southeast and South Asian Primary Source Guidehttp://guides.lib.uw.edu/c.php?g=582886&p=4042569