COMM 4600-003

Spring 2003

Final Paper

This paper serves as an opportunity for you to reflect on your in-class experience and learning this semester and to prepare for your final presentation. Previous assignments have asked you to research and deepen your learning around policies and practices that shape how we understand difference. In this paper, you will need to integrate your learning, and begin identifying potential changes to existing systems. In particular, you should explore what you can do individually and institutionally to transform or reform inequitable structures. Using evidence and information researched or learned over the course of the semester (new sources are welcome but not required, all works used should be cited), address the following questions. You should use a problem/solution case and/or motivated sequence format to build your argument:

· Identify what you see as an especially problematic issue surrounding a particular production of difference. Explain why this is problematic and how it is produced or reproduced culturally or organizationally.

· In this situation, explore how a particular construction of “otherness” functions to both produce a particular understanding of the ‘Others’ and shape and define a particular understanding of “normal.”

· Next, propose a change to existing policy and/or practice that you feel would be an improvement over the status quo. Provide evidence and support for why this is an appropriate and feasible solution to the problem you identified.

· Finally, explain what would be needed to accomplish the change you propose, and what, specifically, you can do to make this change happen.