Paper Proposals

Academic Proposals: The Basics

Proposals (or abstracts) should do two things—tell readers what you are going to say, and interest them reading it.

telling them what you will say

• Identify the topic/subject of your paper—the question/problem/investigation it raises.
• Locate the topic/subject in terms of a field of something (discussion, area, scholarship, discipline, current event)—who/what provides the (intellectual? discursive?) context for the problem/question the paper raises.
• Emphasize your position/proposition/theory—your central idea regarding the question/problem/topic.
• Sketch—this is optional—your two/three points of argument.

interesting them in hearing you say it

• Devise a title that is descriptive and inviting.
• Find words that are accessible to both specialists and non-specialists
• Suggest why it’s important or interesting

Annotated Sample Paper Proposal

[download as a .pdf]

Other Sample Proposals

Keep in mind that proposals for academic papers and presentations are done a number of different ways. Sometimes, you submit as an individual paper (with paper title and proposal). Other times, you submit with others as part of a panel (with panel title and panel proposal, as well as individual paper titles and proposals).

This presentation will examine the various ways individuals construct and communicate identity in the posthuman age. The posthuman age, characterized by fluid identity, blurred boundaries between public and private spheres, and distributed subjectivity across multiple material and virtual environments, both facilitates and demands the construction of micro-narratives. Micronarratives, first theorized in The Postmodern Condition by Jean-Francois Lyotard as “local stories, densely interwoven” that function to explain the world around us, must be redefined in the posthuman age. While individuals still use micronarratives to understand the world, they also use micronarratives to construct the self and to communicate that self to others.

In the posthuman age of abundant technology, individuals use Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, online academic environments, and various other applications to construct a unique identity that might be communicated easily and clearly in online communities densely populated with other individuals. This presentation will first examine the use of social networking sites, avatars, and public blogs as the means through which individuals consciously construct micronarratives comprised of text and images in online public spaces. Then, the presentation will look at the implications of these designed identities and suggest areas for further theoretical and pedagogical research.

Elements of progymnasmata treatises by Hermogenes, Aphthonius, Theon, and Nicolaus are found throughout the history of rhetorical education, with variations on specific exercises appearing in modes-based instruction, process-based models, and post-process approaches to composition. Certainly, progymnasmata are still used in modern writing classrooms as invention strategies, as analytical methods, and as modes of composition.

In the digital age, the ubiquity of technologies and the expanding variety of genres means that we understand “text” more broadly than ever before—our notion of what constitutes a “text” now includes written work as well as multimedia, non-linear, interactive, and new media texts. Most of these digital texts are unquestionably public, having been created, hosted, revised, and repurposed via online and Web 2.0 technologies that encourage both authorship and consumption.

Thanks to the presence of discourse communities online, students already consume, critique, and create new media texts. Their engagement and familiarity with digital texts offers composition teachers a unique opportunity to blend classical rhetorical exercises with modern modes of composition. Using the tools of classical rhetoric, writing instructors can teach interpretation and composition of new media and digital texts, ultimately strengthening students analytical, argumentative, and composition skills.

This presentation will suggest reimagining progymnasmata for teaching composition in the digital age. First, various progymnasmata can be used as a lenses through which to examine and analyze the important features of existing texts, features such as structure, genre, and the use of rhetorical appeals. Second, progymnasmata exercises might be used as heuristics in the development of more substantive new media texts. Third, the exercises can be used as discrete, smaller heuristics that might facilitate students’ composition in primarily digital genres such as fan-fiction, graphic essays, non-linear new media, memes, and mash-ups.

Specifically, the presentation will focus on four of the fourteen progymnasmata–fable, narrative, maxim, and characterization–as they might be used in composition classrooms today. Fable might be used in the analysis and creation of fan-fiction and origin stories. Narrative might be used to help students understand the implications of arrangement and facilitate composition of non-linear new media texts. Maxim, or the amplification of a saying, might be a useful lens through which to interpret and participate in the creation and consumption of internet memes and mash-ups. Finally, characterization might be used to examine the construction of ethos on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Participants will leave with a framework through which they might use classical progymnasmata to teach students “new” ways of analyzing digital texts, as invention strategies to facilitate prewriting, and as heuristics to improve students argumentative and composition skills.

This presentation will examine the ways in which pedagogical materials—particularly visual media and new media—used in university business writing classes participate in the circulation of biased cultural narratives and promote regressive attitudes about women. While often lauded as technologies of change, new media forms frequently borrow their narrative structures from previous forms of media, importing and reproducing underlying assumptions about gender. To trace the circulation of such narratives across media, this presentation will examine examples from business writing teaching materials that are often packaged with business writing textbooks.

The various CD-ROMs, DVD videos, and online supplements often packaged with business writing textbooks impart the illusion of positive change—as textbook publishers move from restrictive print mediums into new medias, we might assume a parallel movement from restrictive narratives of gender into more progressive ones. Too often, we mistakenly associate technological progress with social progress and fail to realize that technology enables the reproduction and diffusion of gender-inflected narratives as much as it enables those who question them. Both reproduction and critique of such narratives rely on the communicative, economic, and cultural networks of meaning transmitted through ideological systems.

Using still images, video, and new medias gathered from various textbook publishers and other sources, this critique of pedagogical materials will show that new media often doesn’t deliver on its promises. Rather, various new media supplements encourage business writing students to view (and often participate in) gendered practices that normalize the preserve the assumption of male authority. These practices highlight the struggle of university-level instructors across the disciplines, to both initiate students into professional discourses often infused with traditional attitudes about gender and identity, while also urging students to become critical of these attitudes and the medias through which they are communicated.

Panel Proposal: This panel will focus on visual representations of women in a variety of genres, including self-portraiture, graphic novels, and new media, to explore the ways gender is reproduced, remixed, reappropriated, and reclaimed. Speakers will discuss how these visual representations can perform a variety of disparate functions; they can be used undermine women’s power and dismiss their voices, but they can also be reclaimed as acts of empowerment and repurposed as activism.

Speaker 1 will discuss how depictions of women in graphic novels show female characters’ increasing power and strength as often accompanied by decreasing mental stability, reinscribing the notion that women cannot handle their power. Ultimately, Speaker 1 will show how these characters might be reinterpreted as empowering figures, particularly for marginalized women with mental health disorders.

Speaker 2 will discuss digital self-portraits (“selfies”) as a tool for self-identification and feminist activism. Although selfies are often dismissed as frivolous acts of vanity or cries for attention, Speaker 2 shows how self-portraiture is an act of self-empowerment and solidarity in online social spaces.

Speaker 3 will discuss the need for a critical literacy of new media production in order to avoid repackaging old cultural understandings of gender in new forms, hiding reductive, prescriptive beliefs about women and women’s roles in plain sight. Speaker 3 will examine three practices common to new media production and show how they can be repurposed to remediate gender in ethical, feminist ways.

This paper explores how the depictions of Jean Grey (from X-Men) in The Dark Phoenix Saga and Scarlet Witch (From The Avengers) in Avengers Disassembled and House of M have served to undermine representations of female power. In their respective comics, both Jean Grey and Scarlet Witch are objectively more powerful than their male counterparts, but as their power develops it is also leads to a decided lack of mental stability which inevitably expresses itself in violence. The comics also utilize visual rhetoric that equates hyper-sexuality with power and insanity. In doing so, the graphic novels reaffirm patriarchal notions that women do not have the mental capacity to handle power or their sexuality.

However, this paper will also explore the ways in which these characters can be re-interpreted as positive figures, particularly for women marginalized for mental health disorders. Using the work of Kay Redfield Jamison, this paper will theorize how mental disorders can be the origins of power and how that can help to transcend social norms. By re-appropriating these characters to be empowering it is possible to undermine the misogyny inherent in these narratives.

This paper focuses on the phenomenon of the digital self-portrait, known colloquially as a selfie, both as a tool for the construction of identity in social media as well as a means for fourth-wave feminist activism. Using scholars such as Susan Sontag, N. Katherine Hayles, and Katherine Bay, this paper examines the selfie past its traditional dismissal as a form of vanity or self-aggrandizement and into its emerging form as a means of activism in social networking spaces.

This paper will examine two social movements, one run by the blog Everyday Feminism and the other by the Facebook group “My Stealthy Freedom,” that combine selfies or photographs of women that use both the photograph and an accompanying text (either in the photograph itself, or as an outside explanatory text) to construct identity, show pride, and put a living face on the burgeoning fourth-wave feminist movement.

With its potential for enabling new social formations, relations, and representations, it is tempting to believe in the promises of new media to facilitate new ways of being, thinking, and seeing. But new media isn’t new; it’s simply old media remixed, repurposed, and repackaged in new forms. As J. David Bolter and Richard Grusin suggest, this remediation, the “representation of one medium in another,” is a defining characteristic of new media. What new media draws from old media is not only topical, but ideological as well; its content emerges from cultural contexts that reflect the beliefs and biases inscribed within.

In order to examine the ways in which new media communicates “old” gendered ideologies, this paper will present three practices common to new media production — the remediation of old media forms, the overanxious response to female authority, and the differential scripting of male and female characters’ language and location. Ultimately, this paper will argue that without a critical literacy of new media production, new media simply reproduces, reinscribes, and reinforces gender binaries and culturally constructed gender roles. At best, this repackaging allows such ideologies to hide in plain sight, and at worst, it enables them to appear progressive.