The Research Process: The Civil Rights Movement

3 units

This interdisciplinary course is designed to assist students in planning and executing capstone projects in the humanities and social sciences. Students will work with archival materials related to the Civil Rights Movement, especially with materials developed for the purposes of commemorating that movement in academic history, documentaries for broad popular consumption, as well as museums, truth commissions, and curricula. But we will also learn to work with other archives concerned less with commemoration of the struggle for civil rights and more with the surveillance and control of that struggle or with resistance to it. With the help of archivists from the Special Collections Department of Olin Library, we will be working with facsimiles of materials that have received little or no prior scholarly attention We will give some attention to the ethics of scholarly research. The course is meant to serve a range of students. We hope that it will enable some students to discover and develop capstone projects based on archives of the CRM, either in the spring semester or in subsequent ones. We expect that some of these projects will be traditional ones, modeled on articles published in scholarly journals, but we will also encourage other kinds of research products intended for a wider public audience. For students with different scholarly interests or academic plans, our course activities are intended to model research processes applicable to other capstone activities.