6.1 In-Depth Seminars

Seminar attendance and participation is captured in your participation grade.

You are expected to complete three seminars over the course of the semester. The goal of the seminars is to go more in-depth on several topics covered during the class and to provide an additional series of venues to develop your analytic and communication skills. Each seminar will consist of three interrelated parts:

  1. in-depth readings,
  2. a group seminar meeting, and
  3. a short response paper.

Seminar topics will be selected by the students as a group, and should align with the topics listed below. Consensus on seminar topics should be reached by class on Monday, August 31. All students will complete the same seminars. Once the seminars are selected, Chris will provide a list of additional journal articles and book chapters to read. You will be expected to retrieve readings from SLU’s Library if they are available there. If they are not, Chris will provide everyone with a pdf copy of the readings. Approximately 40 to 50 pages of additional reading per seminar should be expected.

We will schedule a when all students are available to meet together and discuss the assigned readings. Each seminar meeting will occur after the lectures on the seminar topic (ideally later that week or the next week). Chris will coordinate scheduling the seminar meetings, which will take place in one of the Sociology Department’s conference rooms. You should come to seminar meetings prepared to discuss the readings themselves and draw analytic connections to the course material from both the related week and prior weeks. Attendance and participation in the seminars themselves will be factored into your honors participation grade.

6.1.1 Paper Format

These discussions should inform a response paper written by each student that connects a theme from the in-depth readings and the specific content of the papers to the course as a whole. The paper should be formatted using the following guidelines:

  • Times New Roman font
  • 12 point font size
  • Double spaced
  • 1” margins on top, bottom, and sides
  • Papers should be no less than four and no longer than five pages in length
  • Papers should use in-text, parenthetical citations formatted using American Sociological Association (ASA) standards
  • Papers should include a works cited section on a separate page that is properly formatted using ASA standards - this does not count towards the page limit

6.1.2 Grading

Your papers are collectively worth 18.4% of your final grade

Paper due-dates will be a week after each seminar meeting, and papers will be submitted via Blackboard. Each response paper will be graded on four elements:

  1. Content (35 points): How well does the paper synthesize information from the in-depth readings, other course readings, the course lectures, and other course resources such as documentaries (as appropriate).
  2. Organization (10 points): How well organized is the paper? Does it have an introduction, a conclusion, and a thesis?
  3. Writing (10 points): How well written is the paper? Is it free of spelling and grammatical errors?
  4. Citations (5 points): Are citations correctly applied?

Papers are worth approximately 6.1% of your final grade for each paper.