Sociology Essay
Description
Sociology 426: Race and Family in Popular Culture Policy Paper: Late 19th & Early 20th Centuries Due: Sunday, February 28, 11:59 p.m. For this assignment, I invite you to think more deeply about the racially-distinct consequences of specific public policies enacted (primarily) in the latter half of the 19th century. We’ve encountered written and video examples from scholarly work and from popular culture · Select a policy from the online listing. · Select at least one scholarly work (this can be a published article / book chapter, or a documentary film) and at least one example of popular culture from our list for Weeks 4 – 7 of the class. · NOTE: You are welcome to choose more than one policy, if you think there is a group of policies that works well in concert with each other. You are also free to use examples from multiple scholarly works, and/or multiple examples of popular culture (including those from the first three weeks of the class). However, you MUST include at least one scholarly and one popular culture piece from Weeks 4 – 7. Using the materials from class, discuss the policy and its implications in a 3-to-4 page paper. Please use the following structure: 1) Explain the policy, and provide any insights you might have into how its design or implementation was racialized. Sometimes this was made explicit (ex: the Chinese Exclusion Act or the Indian Removal Act), and sometimes it was more subtle (ex: the Pacific Railroad Act). 2) Discuss how the effects or consequences of the policy(ies) are reflected – or not reflected – in the scholarly work(s) and popular culture example(s) you have chosen. 3) Discuss the implications of the policy, in the short term as well as the long-term (i.e. intergenerational benefits or disadvantages), for families whose members have been categorized differently in terms of race & ethnicity. 4) Provide any analysis you might want to include.
