This is the final essay for the class! Like the papers preceding it, the purpose is to help you continue to hone your skills of arguing points in writing by precisely stating a stance and defending it with evidence in a clear, easy-to-follow manner.

In this essay, the themes are roughly systems of oppression and social psychology.

Timeline

Tuesday 5/3	First Draft Due
Thursday 5/5 - Friday 5/6	Zoom meeting with me about first draft
Friday 5/13	Final draft due

Audience

Ursinus College's academic/intellectual community, including your fellow students, instructors, mentors, etc. You'll want to strike a balance between being thought provoking and exacting, but also accessible to people outside of our class but in our community who may not have read the works you're citing.

Format

• Approximately 1500-1800 words. You may format your paper any way you want with whatever spacing you want (I personally use Overleaf to craft PDF documents in LaTeX, though most people probably prefer Microsoft Word). But regardless, in addition to the text, you should include
  • Your name
  • The title of the paper (you do not need a title page)
  • The date

Writing Goals

• Taking a stance with a clear thesis statement and well-organized, easy-to-follow text
• Lively, distinctive, original voice
• Appropriate and frequent references to text, including passages we haven't explicitly discussed in class, and perhaps new passages that you find on your own
• Thoughtful, provocative, creative, nuanced interpretations of your textual references

Evaluation

We'll be splitting the paper grade into several categories, where you'll be graded on a 10 point scale on each category. Point assignments can be interpreted as follows

9-10	Exemplary; exceeds the goal; a model example for future students
8	Very good; met the goal fully
7	Met the goal minimally
6	Just barely acceptable, but fell short of the mark and needs improvement
0-5	Unsatisfactory; does not meet goal

Below are the categories to which points are assigned

Category	Goal
Main Idea / Thesis Statement	The main idea is clear, concise, debatable, specific, and interesting, and is expressed via a precise thesis statement. Thesis statement connects to the prompt
Creativity / Making It Your Own	Takes a unique, creative approach with a lively, original voice
Textual references	Carefully chosen, frequent, detailed, skillfully integrated references to the texts. Selects several passages that were not discussed in class.
Interpretation of Texts	Student shows interpretations of the text that are creative, nuanced, thought provoking, and/or just plain provocative.
Organization	Each paragraph has clear topic sentences, the document flows from idea to idea and paragraph to paragraph, and the reader avoids "getting lost"
Sentence Level	Sentences should be clear, with varied diction, and edited/polished without grammar and spelling mistakes.
Revisions	There is evidence that the student made an earnest, good faith attempt to address comments from me and/or the writing fellow in their final revision.
Bonus Points (+0.5)	Includes an informative and entertaining title

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Essay Topics (Choose One!)

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The New New Jim Crow (by Chris Tralie)

In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander argues that although there aren't explicitly stated forms of racial control in our country as there were during slavery and the Jim Crow era, that other systems, particularly those of the prison industrial complex and mass incarceration, still function in this way and preserve a racial caste system. She also argues that whenever a large system is dismantled, it often re-invents itself (hence the transition from the Jim Crow to The New Jim Crow).

There is a growing bipartisan movement around prison reform, which raises the possibility that the end of Alexander's "New Jim Crow," as we know it, may be in sight. It is useful, then, to think of what systems may sustain the racial caste system beyond the age of mass incarceration. One hypothesis is that tech-based solutions will quickly supplant it. For instance, so-called e-carceration solutions (e.g. ankle bracelets and compulsory smart phone apps) for surveillance are already becoming ubiquitous. Other more "proactive" and "predictive" forms of surveillance are also in place, which, among other dystopian scenarios, have led to self-fulfilling prophecies of violent crimes.

In this essay, you should argue to what extent the Jim Crow analogy extends into the tech domain in the 2020s. To that end, compare and contrast it with the institutions of slavery, the old Jim Crow, and Alexander's New Jim Crow across different dimensions. In addition to careful citations from The New Jim Crow, you should draw upon at least one idea presented in the first chapter of Ruha Benjamin's Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for The New Jim Code.

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Movement Building / Raising Awareness: What Will I Do / How Do We Live Together? (by Chris Tralie)

One criticism of the 13th and Alexander's The New Jim Crow is that they both go into gory detail about problems to a potentially traumatizing degree, but they (arguably) propose no straightforward remedies. Similarly, Perendecki's Threnody To The Victims of Hiroshima takes one through a visceral meditation of the dark depths of the suffering humans are capable of inflicting on each other, and ends it there. Arguably, raising awareness and diagnosing problems are, in and of themselves, laudable and important goals, particularly since these are such complex problems without simple solutions. However, some people may feel that they are left confused and uncertain about what to do next, and others may feel that they'd rather be isolated from the gory details, or that the gory details are not suitable to convert a mass audience to the cause.

In this essay, you will explore two of the open questions: what will I do and how do we live together, with regards to movement building / raising awareness about a complex, society wide issue of your choice (e.g. LGBTQ rights, voting rights, animal rights, climate activism, grade school curriculum, access to abortion or lack thereof, fake news, etc). What balance should we strive for between a diagnosis and a prescription of a complex, systemic, society wide problem? Is it even wise to propose direct solutions in a single book/documentary at a single point in time? Alternatively, are there diminishing returns when we shock people with details which are important and true, but which might be deeply disturbing and without a clear direction on how to move forward? What approach would you personally take to tackle the problem you have identified?

You should use The New Jim Crow at least peripherally as a positive/negative example to contrast with your choice issue in the intro/conclusion, but you may focus on any other issue important to you throughout the bulk of the essay. I also expect you to draw on some of the psychological ideas in Freud's Civilization And Its Discontents to support your argument.

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A Fractured Self (by Chris Tralie)

In Fun Home, Bechdel paints a picture of the strange juxtaposition between outwardly projected and inwardly lived selves, particularly as orchestrated by her father. Using examples from that book and theories from Freud's Civilization And Its Discontents, explore the questions what will I do and/or how do we live together, with regard to the role that different selves play in society. What role do the stories we tell about ourselves play in shaping our life trajectories and our interactions with others? Where do we blur the line between fantasy and reality, and to what end?

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Another Topic

If none of the above suit your fancy, you may choose another topic that takes a broad slice through what we've covered in the course, as long as you are able to build off of our recent required readings somehow (particularly Sweat, Freud, Alexander, and Fun Home), and as long as you get it approved by me By Wednesday 4/27.