Class, please email me the prospectus of your final project by Friday, April 1.

These guidelines in writing a prospectus may be useful as a guide. You do not need to follow them to the letter, as they are for a specific class. But the overall advice is useful. This online guide is also useful in writing a prospectus and abstract.

Your prospectus should be approximately one typed page, single-spaced or 1.5-spaced — two or three meaty paragraphs. Your prospectus should: 1. Sketch your topic and argument, including a provisional thesis or research question; 2. Identify the primary texts and secondary literature you will discuss — and how you will use them to support your argument; and 3. Include a short bibliography, in MLA style. (If you quote a text,- you should also cite the page number in MLA style.)

I’ve uploaded a friend’s prospectus for a dissertation to the Sample Writings folder on Dropbox. (It’s for a longer project and contains only a draft bibliography, but gives you some sense of writing at the graduate level.)

Prompt possibility one: In the readings for this week, how do unspoken ideas about race, class, gender, or some other some other social structure (nation? geographic location? language?) undergird our conceptions of nature and the environment? What was the most surprising way this week’s readings prompted you to rethink nature?

More open-ended blog prompt: Respond to an interesting passage in one of the readings that you would like to discuss in class.

Choose one  prompt and respond in the comments.

Prompt 1: How do this week’s readings complicate associations between waste (in literal or metaphoric forms) and what Erving Goffman calls “spoiled identity”? Is this association only negative? Do any of the authors give us a way of viewing this association as powerful or useful? How so?

Prompt 2: Do either the Bond Stockton or Butler excerpts cause you to read Kristeva’s theory of abjection differently? How so?

Prompt 3: Is Sedgwick and Moon’s linking of waste and fat convincing? What are the benefits of this linkage and what are the limitations? What does it allow you to apprehend about waste that you hadn’t previously? (Also feel free to comment on the unusual form of the essay.)

Hi class, my prompts this week are a little more open-ended. Choose whichever questions are most interesting to you in the prompts.

Prompt option 1: Both Nagle and George spend a fair amount of time narrating how they came to their writing topics. Why do you suppose they do this? What are the advantages and drawbacks to this approach? What does it bring to the fore in their writings and what does it overlook or veil?

Prompt option 2: Nagle makes reference to several academic theorists in her writing, including Marcel Mauss and Wayne Brekhus. What does her use of these theorists add to her analysis? Does Nagle’s use of these theorists differ from how other writers we’ve read draw on academic theory?

Prompt option 3: Nagle argues that it is important to bring to light what is often invisible to us (the necessary labor of the sanitation worker). What is her justification for this? How is this argument compelling or uncompelling? Does it apply to the other readings we completed for this week? Can you think of a counter-argument?

Prompt option 4: Write two medium-length discussion questions for Trashed by Derf Backderf, tying it to some other reading we’ve done in the course.

Class, for this week, please generate three meaty discussion questions and post them in the comments of this post. Try to generate one discussion question for each article (Reno, Gidwani, Waldrop). To make the question more substantial, begin it with a claim or quote from the essay in question. (If quoting, cite the page number using MLA style.)