Ananya Roy’s Bibliography in Poverty Capital
Order ID:89JHGSJE83839 Style:APA/MLA/Harvard/Chicago Pages:5-10 Instructions:
Ananya Roy’s Bibliography in Poverty Capital
Term Paper Guidelines for GPP
Two Core Points:
- Discuss what makes a suitable source.
Key search engines: Oskicat, JSTOR, ProjectMuse, LexisNexis
For an 8-10 page paper, 12-15 sources should be referenced. You might need to research, review, and read more than that number in order to find the pieces that help your thinking and that you will actually reference in your paper.
Ananya Roy’s Bibliography in Poverty Capital (223-243) points to a range of sources available to you for your papers in global poverty.
Roy, for example, uses a range of sources: official documents (CGAP annual reports, BRAC research reports), newspapers and magazines (The Economist, New York Times), critical scholarly journal articles and recent research (Theory and Event, The Journal of Development Studies, The Journal of Palestinian Studies, Public Culture, Third World Quarterly, Social Text, The New Left Review, etc.), as well as scholarly books and chapters from academic books (Here they might cite Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine, Goldman, Imperial Nature, Tim Mitchell, Rule of Experts). Student research should reflect and mirror this range, in proportion, for the size of their very small paper.
Social Science Research Engines for scholarly articles: JSTOR, ProjectMuse, LexisNexis, SSRN. Engage recent scholarly sources (last 15 years in the 2000s).
Use at minimum 2 academic hard back books and at minimum 3 critical humanities and social sciences journal articles that we did not discuss in class that directly engage their topics.
Q from student: How do I know if my source is an academic, scholarly source?
A: Check the press! Was the book published by academic press or university?
OR Google the author and see if it is an academic researcher.
- Research is an evolving, recursive, and cumulative process.
Come up with a question to begin the research. This question should lead to more questions, which will lead you to sources you need, and more questions that will lead to inconsistencies or holes in the research you have done or that exists in scholarship. Don’t feel stuck with not getting any answers. Some research will only lead to nuanced thinking, cross analysis, and critique of past scholarship.
Finer steps and points:
- Finding your topic and the proper key terms to do your research.
- Actively consider they are interested in: are you interested in the environment? In particular economic policy? In specific cities or rural regions you have traveled to? In Governance? In technology? Philanthropic models and their histories? In racial injustice? In sustainability? In clean air or water or a particular extractive industry? In a particular region? A particular historical crisis or disaster? Students should be able to articulate in office hours why this research topic is theirs and theirs alone, how they came to want to investigate and write about the question/event/case they have chosen.
- Drop these terms into an “Advanced search” in OskiCat, GoogleScholar, JSTOR, ProjectMuse, and see what comes up. Start to read around and find a more specific angle.
- Narrow your case down and get a specific research purview. *Might be the most important step* You only have 8-10 pages. Smaller is always better for undergraduate papers that only have about 1 month to write. How can you take those initial key terms and make them even more specific, smaller, and more narrow, so that you can really write something close and detailed. (Obviously you could not write a history of microfinance in 8-10 pages, but maybe one specific, technologically-driven microfinance initiative in Cambodia would work, etc.)
- Gathering sources.
- See above Anaya Roy’s divisions of research labor.
- Gather a range of sources, physically go to the Main Stacks and get an armful of books, download or print off some new research articles from academic journals, find some recent major investigative reporting accounts or institutional reports.
- Separating the wheat from chaff in those sources.
- Takes notes on while you do the initial process of culling and reading different texts, these notes will help you start to refine your research statement.
- Read with a critical eye! Always read your sources with a critical eye, looking for compelling evidence. Never take anything the author says for granted, pay attention to how authors use evidence and frame analysis. They can and should borrow for bigger frameworks we have taught in lecture to think critically about the information, reports, and arguments they encounter.
- Outlining your paper and writing your provisional thesis statement.
- Your thesis statement will accord to you as you are reading and in the notes you take as you research. Eventually you should have a clearly developed hypothesis for you paper.
- Drafting your paper.
- Introduction sets the tone for the paper. Give the reader your claim and set up the structure of the paper and the stakes, contextualize your case study in the broader themes and questions and problems it engages in the context of global poverty and development.
- Body: the bulk of the paper will support the argument and cite your sources. Remember topic sentences for each paragraph and to keep your voice separate from the author’s you cite.
- Conclusion: Up to you how you want to teach conclusions, I like to see relevance and connections to bigger philosophical and political questions or to overall academic scholarship. You can summarize neatly what you have done above and move to discuss some problems in the research or complicate the claims you have made.
- Revising your paper.
- Revise, edit, rewrite. Take a break from your paper for at least 36 hours, come back to it, give it copy edits, rewrite sentences that do not make sense. Ask a friend in the class to read what you have done, do a peer exchange.