Drafting a Rationale in Six Steps
By Terri Senft (terri.senft@nyu.edu)
If you are reading this, you are probably a Gallatin student looking for guidance
regarding your Colloquium
Rationale. To help my own primary advisees, I’ve developed a “how
to” sheet that combines insights from Sara Murphy and Vasu Varadhan
with my own thoughts on the subject.
Below, you'll see I've broken the rationale writing process into six steps,
which I offer to students with the huge caveat: you must resist the temptation
to follow my steps as if using a recipe to bake a cake. There are two important
reasons for this. First, every primary adviser has a different view of the
rationale drafting process, and you need to confer with your own adviser before
taking everything I say here to heart.
Second, even if you adviser DOES agree with my view of the rationale drafting
process, you may want to change the order of the steps below, combine elements
from different steps, and so forth. Rather than sequential dictates to be
followed in chronological fashion, think of these steps more as "check
boxes" to get you started, and to review to check for anything missing
once you draft your rationale.To keep the recipe analogy, you aren't just
making A cake; you are making YOUR cake. Your rationale should reflect your
mode of thinking, not mine.
Now, to the steps...
1. Briefly describe your experience at Gallatin and how you formed
your concentration.
How and why did you come to be here? What is your area of concentration? What
have you done (classes, indie studies, internships, creative work outside
of Gallatin) in conjunction with your concentration topic? What was the most
important book, film, exhibit, article, image you experienced to date? Why?
2. Articulate three questions stemming from your concentration that
you plan on exploring in your colloquium.
I suggest thinking of your rationale as if it were a pitch for a course you
might teach, rather than a formal research paper with well-developed argumentation.
Sara Murphy points out that just as a department has many courses it offers
its students, your concentration will likewise be a big area of inquiry. What
you want to do in your rationale, and latter in your colloquium is map out
a specific angle or issue that you are focusing on within the concentration.
To do this,it helps to focus your rationale around a series of interrelated
questions stemming from and honing in on a specific element of your concentration.
This is often the most difficult part of writing the rationale, and it helps
to consult with your adviser here, since different advisers have different
understandings of the colloquium’s breadth. For me, “commodity
culture” would be a concentration topic, “women and commodity
culture“ might be a colloquium topic, and one question raised in the
rationale might be, “What does it mean to speak of the female consumer?”
Other advisers will have different understandings of the concentration/colloquium/questions
paradigm than the one I’m mapping here, though, which is why it’s
important to double-check with them before proceeding too far into the rationale
process.
While I recommend you come up with at least three inter-related questions,
you could have more, or even less than three. Here are some popular ways to
articulate your questions:
A. Begin with the words "what" and/or "how." For example,
if your concentration is in reception and the arts, you might ask, "What
does it mean to speak of emotion in music?" If your concentration is
in theories of modernism, you might ask, "How has the notion of collage
figured in formalism?" In order to avoid dangerous philosophical terrain,
try not to use "why" when formulating your questions.
B. Use the "here's a contradiction" approach. Sara Murphy gives
this example: "Reading works in political theory and women’s studies,
I noticed something intriguing. While we often think of the period of the
long nineteenth century as ushering in a kind of repressive series of attitudes
toward women and public life, it is also the period when modern feminism takes
root and makes a very large impact on social, cultural, and political life.
How could I account for this apparently mysterious contradiction?"
C. Contest a black and white view of a phenomenon. Sara Murphy gives this
example: “While developing my concentration in post-coloniality and
its manifestations in literature and culture, I noted that one major idea
scholars speak of is called “hybridity or hybridization.” According
to the critic Homi Bhabha, this means that there is an interpenetration between
the cultures of colonized peoples and the cultures of those who are or have
been colonizers. Some writers seem to celebrate this. But I have come to wonder
about it. Doesn’t this mean, at least in part, that formerly colonized
peoples have lost their cultures of origin perhaps definitively? Could this
be imperialism by other means? "
D. Try the “what are we not seeing here” approach.Again from Sara
Murphy: "As I developed my concentration in literature and politics,
I began to ask myself whether European novelists in the 20th century were
interested in politics at all. It seemed odd: while the nineteenth century
novels I read were so concerned with the events of day--Eliot, Thackeray,
Balzac, for instance--the twentieth-century Western European novelists I read
seemed interested only in forms and innovations in representation. Was there
any political agenda, I came to wonder, in James Joyce’s Ulysses? In
Virginia Woolf’s The Waves? Here’s what I think so far…"
3. Demonstrate that you understand that the roots of your three questions
can be found within ancient texts.
Vasu Varadhan argues that nearly every abstract question you can think of
has its roots in ancient thought. You probably want to list about four ancient
texts in your rationale that both "tell" and "show" something
about your questions. For instance, you could link the colloquium question,
"What makes a great speech?" to Aristotle's Rhetoric, which works
by TELLING the reader what makes great speechifying. You could also link it
to Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, which shows a great example of classic oratory
in Marc Anthony's "Friends, Romans, Countrymen" speech.Here are
the most common ways students link ancient texts to their colloquium question:
A. Chronological precedent: In this case, the student uses an ancient text
to situate the date a modern phenomenon may have in fact “begun”
Examples: Using Travels of Marco Polo to suggest that globalization may have
initiated long before modernity; using writing of Sappho trace the history
of “feminine writing”.
B. Dramatic analogue: In this case, a student uses a work of theatre, poetry,
fiction etc. to demonstrate explore the ancient roots of a particular psychological
or sociological phenomenon. Examples: Exploring how ambition fuels the characters
in Macbeth; demonstrating that Antigone struggled with the issue of family
versus the state; discussing the social protests against war articulated by
the women in Lysistrata, etc. etc.
C. Philosophical Genealogy: In this case, a student explores the ancient roots
of a particular contemporary philosophical question they are considering.
Examples: Comparing the treatment of simulation in Plato’s Republic
to Baudrillard’s Simulations; using Kant’s writings on the sublime
to theorize natural disaster reporting.
D. Philosophical Critique: In this case, a student critically assesses the
political and social costs of an ancient text. Example: Luce Irigaray’s
feminist critique of Plato’s Cave metaphor; Homi Bhabha’s postcolonial
critique of Aristotle’s theories of mimicry and mimesis.
4. Demonstrate how your three questions are interdisciplinary in nature,
spanning the humanities, the social sciences and/or the natural sciences.
Again, your choice of text may be one that tells the reader about the subject
(e.g. Karl Marx's notion of commodity, Freud's notion of the superego) and/or
one that shows the reader (e.g. novels about the industrial revolution, plays
about the inner life of the bourgeois housewife, etc.) You probably want to
list about four texts in your rationale.
5. Articulate the stakes of your colloquium by grounding your abstract questions
in concrete, contemporary material.
There are many ways to articulate the stakes of your colloquium, or what researchers
call the "so what" question. One approach is to cite stories from
your life that can serve as test cases. Another approach is to discuss general
trends in contemporary life. A third is to bring in audio or visual objects
to serve as touch points for discussants. In this section of the rationale,
your job is to explain what you plan on doing to make your colloquium come
to life.
For instance, to ground the question, "What constitutes success in art?"
a student might draw on a personal experience interning for a television station
that rejected a documentary on a noteworthy topic because it wasn't 'sexy'
enough. Alternately, he or she might discuss the difficulty that genre-defying
visual artists have breaking into today's art market. Still another approach
might be to briefly replicate a classic psychology experiment where students
were asked to adjudicate certain slides of art work. Imagination can be great
thing in this section of the rationale, but it is important to remember that
when it comes time for the colloquium, demonstrations should last only as
long as necessary to make your point and no longer.
6. Don't shy away from contradictions and confusions regarding your
colloquium topic.
This is the time to talk about any "wild card" texts your ntroduce
to your colloquium, or any other general ideas that contradict, confuse or
generally "dirty up" your clean thoughts about your colloquium topic.
As Sara Murphy writes, "Don't shy away from them. Put them out there."