Instructions

The paper (4–6 pages long) is due, as an attachment, via the “Assignments” tool on Canvas, by 11:55pm Tuesday, November 4 (in PDF or any format easily converted to PDF, e.g. MSWord).

The topics listed here are suggestions. If you want to write on another topic, feel free to do so. It might be a good idea, however, in that case, to check with me ﬁrst.

Note that the topics tend to have many sub-questions. You need not (and probably should not) try to answer all of them. (You certainly should not just answer them one after another in order—that would make a bad paper.) I put them there to suggest various directions for thinking about the topic, and in particular to head oﬀ superﬁcial or excessively simple ways of thinking about it.

The main focus of the paper should be, one way or another, on texts we’ve read for this class, though you’re welcome to use other material also if it seems useful/relevant. If you do use outside sources, it should go without saying that you must cite them, and provide enough bibliographical information that I can ﬁgure out what they are.[1]If you have any questions about plagiarism and related issues, please see https://guides.library.ucsc.edu/citesources. To ﬁnd out what happens if you are accused of plagiarism, see the academic misconduct policy: https://ue.ucsc.edu/academic-misconduct.html. (For sources from required reading, title and page number should be suﬃcient.)

I recommend an attempt to interpret (understand/explain/make sense of) the views of the authors we’ve read, rather than, say, an attempt to make an argument of your own against them. (I recommend this particularly if one or more of these authors rubs you the wrong way or seems obviously wrong or uninteresting.) All of the suggested topics below are along those lines. This is only a recommendation, however: I suspect that an eﬀort in this direction is most likely to produce a good paper, but if you think you have a good idea along other lines, go ahead and try it.

AI policy: I encourage the use of AI assistance with proper caution (i.e., keeping in mind that current AI is often wrong). You may use AI assistance basically in any way that would not constitute cheating if you used a human for the same thing. Similarly, you should cite the AI in cases where you would cite a human. If in doubt, feel free to ask me for clariﬁcation.

You can ﬁnd answers to some commonly asked questions about my assignments and grading in my FAQ.

This document, and all other instructor-generated material in this course, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.