Week 3- Adichie as advice for composing in the Social Sciences
Adichie’s TED Talk core advice centers on rejecting “single stories”. For social science composition, this translates to several key principles: avoid reducing complex phenomena, communities, or issues to one-dimensional explanations; we should seek multiple perspectives and voices when researching topics; and understand that incomplete representations can perpetuate harmful stereotypes even when they contain elements of truth.
Adichie emphasizes that stories have the power to both “dispossess” and “malign” and “empower and to humanize,” making it crucial for social science writers to approach their subjects with nuance and recognize the diversity and complexity of the people and communities they study.
To apply this advice in my work, I will consciously diversify my sources to include voices from different backgrounds, particularly those from marginalized communities who are often subjects of research rather than authors of it. I’ll also try remain aware of my own position and potential biases, ensuring that my academic writing contributes to understanding rather than reinforcing harmful single stories.
Tan & Lee
Week 4: Tan & Lee
Both Lee’s “Mute in an English-Only World” and Tan’s “Mother Tongue” present rich explorations of Asian American subcultures navigating the dominant English-speaking American culture. These readings reveal the complex insider/outsider dynamics experienced by immigrant families, where children often serve as cultural bridges between their parents’ heritage and American society. Lee provides the insider perspective of a Korean American child forced into the role of translator and cultural mediator. Similarly Tan occupies the insider position of a Chinese American daughter “ashamed” of her mother’s “limited” English, while simultaneously critiquing the outsider assumptions that devalue non-standard English speakers.
What I liked the most is how both authors illuminate the painful negotiations of identity that occur within immigrant families—the shame, translation burdens, and linguistic code-switching that children experience. However, I would have appreciated more exploration of how these language dynamics affected their relationships with their heritage cultures and whether they maintained fluency in Korean or Chinese.
For my transcultural interview, I would want to probe deeper into these identity negotiations by exploring the long-term impacts and coping strategies, as both readings hint at lasting effects but don’t fully examine the healing or reconciliation process.
Observation Experience
Week 6: Observation Experience with Image
This task was the most enjoyable one, as it combined what I love to do (browsing social media) with academic and methodical work.
In this task, I learned how to observe others’ behaviors and statements, as well as take notes about their daily or weekly routines, the dynamics of this field, how mutual respect is maintained without overstepping boundaries, and how this field (the psychology community on X) is managed.
I tried to take notes in an organized manner to make it easier for me to write an article later. I also had to observe from a distance, without participating or asking personal questions, which was a bit strange and difficult for me as I’m not used to entering any online community without participating in it.
After all these steps (observation, note-taking, and organizing information), I had to compile everything into a single article, discuss it, and share it with the reader, so they could understand the entire community (or get a general overview of the community) without needing to enter and observe it personally.
Naylor’s Mama Day
Week 7: Naylor’s Mama Day
This excerpt from Gloria Naylor's "Mama Day" evokes several literary works that explore isolated communities with their own mythologies and power structures. It reminds me of Toni Morrison's "Beloved" in its blend of African American folklore with supernatural elements, and the way historical trauma is woven into present-day community identity. The setting of Willow Springs—an island caught between states, belonging to neither—recalls Gabriel García Márquez's magical realism in "One Hundred Years of Solitude," where an isolated community exists by its own rules and time.
Naylor's writing style is oral and communal, employing a collective narrative voice that speaks as "we" and "us" throughout. The prose mimics the rhythms of spoken storytelling, with digressions, repetitions, and language shifts fluidly between vernacular and more formal registers...
What particularly stood out was the mysterious phrase "18 & 23" that threads through the narrative—a code that the community understands but refuses to explain to outsiders.
On second reading, I noticed how this phrase functions as a test of belonging: those who understand don't need explanation, while those who don't (like Reema) reveal their outsider status through their misinterpretation.
The excerpt offers a sharp critique of academic ethnography and cultural appropriation. The story of "Reema's boy" serves as a cautionary tale about how external researchers can misunderstand the communities they study and that "someone who didn’t know how to ask wouldn’t know how to listen". Naylor suggests that true cultural understanding cannot be extracted through academic methods only—it requires genuine relationship, respect, and the patience to listen on the community's terms.
We Kissed the Tomato and Then the Sky
Week 8: Wehle-We Kissed the Tomato and Then the Sky
In Wehle’s essay, several core fieldworking strategies emerge: use of personal narrative, sensory detail, and the structuring theme of time.
By positioning herself as both participant and observer, she invites us into her emotional world while simultaneously documenting familial context of her mother’s final days. Her use of concrete imagery—like her mother’s flowery nightgowns, audio tapes, and tomato plants—grounds abstract themes like grief, memory, and legacy in tangible, relatable elements. The passage of time, marked through dates, seasons, and rituals, becomes both a narrative structure and a thematic presence that underscores the emotional shifts in her story.
Reflecting on Wehle’s strategies, I am especially drawn to her use of time and sensory detail as tools for deeper observation. In my own fieldwork, I would like to apply a similar strategy of tracking to understand routines and patterns.
Baldwin & Shively
Week 9: Baldwin & Shively
Baldwin’s and John Shively’s reflective essay both confront the persistent and systemic nature of racism in America, particularly as embodied in law enforcement practices.
Baldwin’s 1966 account of brutal police violence in Harlem reveals the embedded cultural reality of Black communities treated as what Baldwin terms “occupied territory”—a militarized surveillance state that polices rather than protects., where any resistance is met with overwhelming force.
Shively’s reflection, written more than five decades later, echoes Baldwin’s observations while contextualizing them within the modern killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery. Both works include cultural information about the everyday lived experiences of Black Americans under systemic racism, particularly through the lens of policing.
A fieldworker might ask: “How do community members describe their relationship with the police?” or “In what ways do past traumas shape current social movements?” Sources could include oral histories from affected communities, police training materials and protocols, court records and legal proceedings, community organization archives, and ethnographic studies of both police departments and the neighborhoods they patrol.
The passage of time between Baldwin’s and Shively’s essays is haunting in its consistency. The fifty-four-year gap between these essays is perhaps the most sobering aspect of this comparison—Baldwin’s observations about police investigating themselves and the community’s lack of recourse remain virtually unchanged in Shively’s account of contemporary police killings.
One Course Learning Objective
Week 10: One Course Learning Objective
If I were asked: What is the most important thing you learned in this semester? My answer would undoubtedly be: enhance strategies for reading, drafting, revising, editing, and self-assessment, which is learning objective 2.
Throughout the semester, I was refining my skills by reading sources, drafting every essay I am working on, and then revising and polishing this draft and evaluating it by reading and listening to it (using text-to-speech websites or features). If I didn’t like a part, I would revise it until I was satisfied with the result.
We didn’t stop at all these steps that refine my work; my classmates also helped me with all these steps when we did peer reviews. The professor also taught us step by step how to organize content, what constitutes good content and what doesn’t, and she was able to extract ideas from our minds that we wouldn’t have thought of without her precise questions. This is the most important fruit I harvested this semester.
The text-to-speech features that I always use:
Benefits of a Literature Review
Week 13: Benefits of a Literature Review
Literature reviews serve important functions in social sciences by compiling current knowledge to identify patterns, gaps, and theoretical developments within the field, while providing a foundation for future research directions.
In my anti-natalism literature review, this work aligns with these benefits by tracking how a once-marginal philosophical position evolved into a developed ethical framework with multiple theoretical approaches. By organizing the literature thematically rather than chronologically, my literature review reveals important connections between different philosophical traditions – showing how contemporary anti-natalist arguments have moved beyond simple consequentialist concerns about suffering to incorporate complex ethical principles based on consent, autonomy, and environmental considerations. This synthesis demonstrates the academic legitimacy that anti-natalism has gained while simultaneously revealing unresolved logical challenges.
What interested me most in my literature review is the fundamental paradox identified by McMahan – how can we compare existence to non-existence for a specific person when making ethical judgments about reproduction? This paradox cuts to the core of both anti-natalist and pro-natalist arguments, suggesting that the entire philosophical debate may need reframing.
The intended point of my literature review is to demonstrate that anti-natalism has evolved from a marginal position to a legitimate field of philosophical inquiry, while revealing significant gaps in how these frameworks address issues (such as the dilemma of how we can get permission from the non-existent to exist? And what guarantees that their decision would be “no” instead of “yes”?).
To bring this point to the forefront, I need to strengthen the connections between my thesis statement and the discussion section, and make clearer how each philosophical framework contributes to the academic legitimacy of anti-natalism.
Reverse Outline
Week 14: Reverse Outline
Writing a reverse outline was extremely helpful for me in writing because it reveals the actual structure and flow of argument in the draft. By summarizing the main point of each paragraph after writing, I could identify structural problems such as paragraphs that don’t advance my argument, ideas out of logical order, or sections where my thesis isn’t clearly supported. Writing a reverse outline is especially valuable for complex academic writing like literature reviews, as I needed to compile multiple sources while maintaining a clear analytical thread throughout.
The reverse outline was a BIG help for the anti-natalism literature review. When I initially drafted the responses, I could see that although I had comprehensive coverage of different philosophical frameworks, I wasn’t connecting them enough to my central thesis about the evolution of anti-natalism from margin to legitimate academic status. The reverse outline process revealed that my discussion section needed to more clearly evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of each approach rather than just summarizing them, and that I needed stronger transitions showing how contemporary frameworks built upon or responded to earlier arguments. This helped me transform a collection of source summaries into a coherent analytical argument.
I will use the reverse outline strategy in the future whenever I write longer analytical pieces, especially during the revision process after completing the first draft. It’s particularly useful for research papers, argumentative essays, and any writing where I need to compile multiple sources or complex ideas. I’ll also use it when I feel my writing is straying from my main argument – a reverse outline can quickly show me where I’ve gone off track and help me refocus on my central thesis. It, the reverse outline, is the entire essay divided into a few lines(:
Composition Process
Week 15 Composition Process
What helped me most in this course is the organization. Everything was precisely arranged so that I couldn’t get lost or misunderstand the instructions– the division of units, the documents in the general documents containing both instructor instructions and external instructions, the selection of tasks for each unit, and even the required tasks (the process) upon which the larger task is built. For example, when we were asked to write the field observations essay, there were several steps before we entered the main task, such as: FO subject Description, and Field observation Notes, then writing the first draft, followed by in-depth discussion in class and peer review, which gave me a clear vision of the final form of my essay.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Bonus: King
In The Role of the Behavioral Scientist in the Civil Rights Movement, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. issues a powerful call to action for researchers, especially those in the behavioral sciences, to confront the moral and structural crises of racism in America.
He challenges the myth of objectivity and neutrality in academia, insisting that silence in the face of injustice amounts to complicity!
King emphasizes that the crisis facing Black Americans is not due to individual pathology but systemic oppression, as a society that demands that Black people be peaceful, while not providing them with the minimum of a decent life, is a society that mocks justice.
King also calls on behavioral scientists to expose and critique the institutional forces—economic, political, and cultural—that sustain racial inequality. He urges scholars not only to study the world but to help change it—by aligning their research with the goals of justice, participating in direct action, and refusing to hide behind the false comfort of detached analysis.
Leave a Reply