KBP:  Topics in Fall 2002
Before embarking on research, we have to define the topic. This is done by consulting experts in the field.We cannot do this by using a dictionary.  We have to look in specialized reference books.  Sometimes we need to struggle with terms and definitions, or consult an expert or two.
 
(Consulting an expert means looking in a journal or other peer-reviewed source.)  In scholarship, we refer to books as if they were the people who wrote them.  Therefore, we often call the book by the author's name -- not its title.
After you have defined the key topic and asked ONE clear question, you will have to read several peoples'  views. Make certain you understand, then analyze them.   Only then can you come to a conclusion of your own.

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Here are some of the topics under consideration by students this semester:

Unfiled items:
Did native Americans actually sell Manhattan Island for a handful of beads?
monstrous art, imagination or reality?

music, its effects:  Do certain simple, repetitive, rhythmic music patterns enhance concentration and mental performance?

"Venuses:"  student article in Italian-English.

Alphabetically filed items:

Find this article:
Baird, AA, SA Gruber and DA Fein, et al. "Functional magnetic resonance imaging of facial affect recognition in children and adolescents." Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 1999; 38 (2): 195-9.   < not MLA format
Athens, Lonnie H.  The Creation of Dangerous Violent Criminals
“Athens, a streetwise and somewhat combative young academic with a mission...isn't sentimental
about criminals, arguing in The Creation of Dangerous Violent Criminals  and Violent Criminal
 Acts and Actors Revisited that psychologizing criminals allows them to escape legal responsibility,
encouraging further violence that affects succeeding generations in an infinite regress.

'Not poverty or genetic inheritance or psychopathology but violentization is the cause of criminal violence,' Athens writes, unavoidably employing sociologese: 'violentization' means a social process occurring over a
period of time, a kind of apprenticeship into brutality in which the budding criminal is complicit."

                                         review by Joyce Carol Oates (who is a famous fiction writer and teacher)
  Rolland Barthes' work:  http://www.sunderland.ac.uk/~os0tmc/myth.htm
 
 
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