Questions about the research process:
- How do I weed out info that isn’t useful so I don’t waste my time on unhelpful articles/books?
- How do I determine if a source is credible and unbiased?
- Can I use sources that state opinion or are biased?
- How can I use my sources to narrow down my topic? Won’t more information just broaden my topic?
- How do I know when I’ve done enough research?
- How extensively do I need to use each source? Can I use a small amount of info from one source without referring to the bigger argument made in that source?
- How do I figure out with discipline my topic falls under?
- How do I make a topic that some may find trivial seem important/sound scholarly/
Topics/questions that interest me:
- (Under the umbrella of depictions of female leadership in television)
How has it changed over time? Are we getting better or worse? What defines “better”? - How do world events (e.g. politics) affect what we see on TV with regards to female leadership?
- How do comedies and dramas deal with female leadership differently/similarly?
- What effect does female leadership behind the scenes (producers, creators, writers, directors, etc.) have on what appears on screen?
- What types of female leadership are most common or uncommon on TV? Leadership in the workplace? In politics? In families?
I’ll touch on most of these in class today, as they’re more general, but for your #7 and #8 (first list)…
#7 Media & Pop Culture, under the umbrella of cultural studies. It’s interdisciplinary, so you don’t get one discipline. That means you can use whatever methods you want, which we WILL talk about in class.
#8 I can give you a whole bunch of articles on justifying pop culture studies, which is its own interdisciplinary discipline, like leadership studies. Others have done it before you, so you don’t have to do this–just borrow their arguments.