Advanced Justice Study

Content Outline for Advanced Justice Study upper-level course.
IMPORTANT FOR ASSIGNMENT COMPLETION: Sources will come from mainly book (Giroux, Henry, (2014). Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education) as well as class notes and online sources as back up

Many of you are worried about this assigment Please read the following very carefully. If you have questions, please ask me.
Think of this assignment as the beginning of a goal; a completed academic paper. Most textbooks and guides on writing tell you how to begin with some kind of brainstorming process, from which you will come up with a topic. Then, you are counselled to do some “research” after which you will formulate an outline of some sort. The outline usually looks something like this:
1. Introduction
2. Body
3. Conclusion
Or, if you want to get more ambitious, it might look something like this:
1. Introduction
2. Why I chose this topic
3. Why is this topic important
4. What I am going to argue in this paper
5. A“literaturereview”
6. Your main arguments. Somewhere in this section, there’s usually a “theory”
section.
7. Your analysis of the claims you have made and suggestions for future research
8. Conclusion
None of these structures are “wrong,” but the reality is that if we follow the process in the first paragraph above, we will inevitably run into problems: These problems include, but are not limited to the following. They are in the form of questions or statements I get from students every semester, with my usual answers in brackets.
1. I can’t figure out a topic. Can you give me one? (No)
2. I can’t figure out how to narrow down my topic. (That’s because you are going
about this the wrong way)
3. Where do I start? (At a beginning. Any beginning will do)
4. How many pages do you want? (I don’t know. I gave you a limit, but that’s a
guideline. How many do you need?)
5. What is a thesis statement (its your main argument stated briefly)
6. How many references should there be? (How many do you need?)
7. Is there a grading rubric or instruction sheet for this assignment? (You’re reading it).
8. Do I have to read the book(s) for this assignment? (umm. Yeah). 9. Can I have an extension? (That depends….)
Notice that in the almost four decades I’ve been teaching university students, very rarely have I been asked questions like:
I have a lot of material, but I can’t seem to make sense of it. (I can help you with that)
I’m having trouble getting organized (Me too. That’s writing)
I’m procrastinating (Not necessarily a bad thing. If you are reading and thinking about the paper, you’re not procrastinating)
I’m depressed because I’m pretty sure my writing sucks (Mine does too, at first. That’s what the shitty first draft is all about. You get used to it).
So with this little preamble, let me give you some guidance on this assignment. The first thing I will tell you is this: If you are following a plan like the ones described above you are doing it the hard way. The problem with the methods above is that they force you into thinking and working in a linear way because the final paper is a linear thing; it has a beginning, a middle and an end. But our brains don’t work this way. In class, I will illustrate this. For this assignment, you are going to reverse the process described above.
The assignment asks you to write an Abstract and a

Content Outline.
The Abstract should be no more than 200 words (give or take a few). In class we will discuss what an abstract is, but in brief, it is a very condensed summary of the entire paper. Hahh! How do you like that for a challenge? It’s usually not a challenge AFTER you’ve written a paper, and in fact I’ve read tons of journal articles where the author essentially cut and paste bits of the paper into the abstract and stitched them together (I do this myself).
But I’m asking you to write the abstract first. Why? Because this will force you into basically guessing about what you want to write, why it’s important, what you want to argue, why, and what we should do about it. When you go to do this you won’t have a clue about what to write. That’s OK. Just write something. Pretend. But use some reason here. You don’t want to say you will write a paper that will examine the ontological argument for the existence of a female God in a Post-modern society. That would not be good. Pick something that intrigues you. Something that makes you
angry. Something that gives you hope. Something about your experiences. Draw on your life, or someone else’s.

In the second part of the assignment you have to come up with a content outline. The content outline differs from a topic outline because each item in the content outline is filled with actual content, not just a heading. Here’s are examples:
Topic Outline [NOT what you’re going to do] X
1. Introduction
2. The issue of X is very important because a, b, c, d.
3. In this paper I will argue that blah blah blah
4. Body
5. Statistical or other evidence about the topic or problem
6. What others have said about the problem
7. What I am saying about the problem
8. Oh yeah, something about that theory thingie
9. Conclusion
10. wrap up what I said, maybe some policy implications or suggestions for further research.
✅
1. Introduction
a. On Christmas day of 2017 in Victoria, British Columbia, Andrew Berry killed his young daughters during his court-ordered access to custody period. On June 20th 2000, Ralph Hadley murdered his wife Gillian and subsequently committed suicide. Such incidents are all too common in Canada and indeed, around the world. Indeed, the rate of police-reported intimate partner violence in 2015 in Canada was almost four times higher for women than men [citation, citation] {note to self} Do I need more information and examples here?
b. The problem of lethal violence against women warrants attention because as [citation] points out…. {note to self} find more commentary on the impact of the problem on society. {note to self} I need more information on x, y, and z.
2. Maybe that newspaper article in the Star can give me some more information c. {note to self} I will have to check it out and follow the lead
3. {note to self} What keywords should I use when searching the library databases?
4. Body
5. There have been numerous theoretical explanations advanced to explain lethal
violence against women, but none as useful as feminist theories of crime. {note to self} which ones? Which theorists make the most sense here? Why is this
Content Outline [what you are going to do]
perspective useful? What does it explain?
6. In contrast to perspectives that blame external factors such as alcohol and drug
consumption, mental illness, or poverty, the perspective I adopt here is better because…. {note to self} why is it more useful? Who said so? Any problems with the perspective you are adopting? Am I missing something?
7. Andsoonandsoon.
What you are doing here is trying to answer the mini puzzles you set up for yourself in the abstract you wrote. Note that some of those puzzles cannot be solved. You may not have time, they may be unsolvable, but for whatever reason, expect that your abstract will eventually change, as will your outline.
As you answer your puzzles, you will build a very shitty, very incomplete, full of holes piece of drivel.