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Thursday, October 13, 2005
Proposals
I submitted my paper proposal/abstract and outline for Chiefdoms (my favorite course of the semester so far). I'll reproduce it here but I'll wait to hear back from my prof first so as to avoid posting something completely off the wall (I don’t want to be denied tenure ten years from now!).
My other two research proposals are due on Tuesday. The one for Archaeological Methods is to be sort of a mock National Science Foundation proposal for funding. I downloaded the forms and guidelines and I must admit I’m glad I’m not actually doing this for real yet. It’s good practice though and will surely come in handy down the road. The summary page that we have to turn in Tuesday must contain a “statement of objectives and methods to be employed, intellectual merit of the proposed activity, and broader impacts resulting from the proposed activities.” Yikes…
There’s no specific format for the graduate seminar research paper, although it will be treated as “an extended research proposal.” This paper will have an applied dimension because, well, I’m in an applied anthropology department. This shouldn’t be too hard because I would have trouble justifying a research project in the first place unless it had some real-world applicability rather than simply doing archaeology for the sake of digging up stuff and documenting it. Like the Methods paper, this one will be a project we won’t actually carry out (or at least don’t have to) but to make it good I’ll have to ignore that fact.
As I mentioned in another post, all three papers will focus on some aspect of Maya agriculture. The Chiefdoms edition is sort of my reference point with the two other papers building off of that to suit the particular needs. Besides being incredibly interesting, there are several applied dimensions that one can take with agricultural research. For an example, check out one of my favorite charities, Sustainable Harvest International.
Posted by Will at October 13, 2005 05:07 PM in Academia | Anthropology | Papers and Essays