Assignments |
Your second examination for the class will be to design a multi-media presentation on American public housing in the post New Deal era. The presentation must incorporate at least three of the themes and concepts that have been introduced in the class-- e.g., gangs/social order, domesticity, public space, economics, inequality, policing. The project must be posted on the class website.
The project must be guided by an argument or orienting principle. For example, you may want to critically examine the ways in which public housing communities are affected by crime or, you could survey the changing architecture of public housing. Each of these themes could be sub-divided by the sociological themes/concepts in the class and it will be your task to provide a logical narrative that ties the themes/concepts together.
Think of the project as a website that serves as a resource for a general readership. Your project will be accompanied by others that will be addressing different aspects of the public housing lifestyle, and, together, they may all be found on a fictitious website "www.publichousing.com." Your title would be one link among many and, when the individual moves into your website s/he will find a coherent narrative on public housing, images, graphs, tables, links to other interesting websites on cities or housing (or public housing).
An example of a project would be entitled "Family and Public Housing." This project might incorporate the following sociological concepts: domesticity, politics, and public space. And, the theme might be to understand the ways the ways in which the public housing environment shapes the experiences for families living there.
To do so, one could incorporate some of the photographs on the class website and/or scan newly discovered images that document unique types of social interaction among kin and peers within public housing spaces (public, private, semi-private, hidden, etc.). Perhaps one could cite evidence to show that certain types of crime affects families in public housing because of the organization of space. One may find data to show that certain types of family structures are prevalent in public housing and discuss the implications for sociological patterns. A brief review of literature on political action in public housing would reveal the role that women played in community politics. And, a review of the literature would provide many existing studies that have already examined this theme. The project might contain images, analyses, links to other websites where further information may be obtained, quotes from public housing residents, and so on.