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Review Your Social Action Assignment
- Let's review your assignment:
- "To begin, you will select a social justice issue." (from the Research Essay assignment description)
- Write an argumentative and information research essay on your topic.
- Specifically:
- What is the problem?
- What is a brief history of the problem?
- What is the actual controversy?
- Why is this problem and related controversy significant?
- What is the central question?
- What are the competing answers to the central question?
- What evidence, examples, rhetorical appeals and devices does each competing answer use to support its stance?
Select a Social Aspect Research Topic
- Professor Horowitz suggests the following:
- Indigenous land/water supply rights (Dakota Access Pipeline)
- Flint, Michigan water crisis
- murdered and missing indigenous (aboriginal) women in the US and Canada
- femicide on the US/Mexico border (Ciudad Juarez murders)
- the right to be appointed counsel for unrepresented children in immigration proceedings
- for-profit prisons and undocumented immigration reform
- the prison industrial complex and inmate rights
- transgender inmate rights
- preventing and responding to violence against the trans community
- LGBTQ homeless youth and shelter policies
- protecting LGBTQ youth from "conversion therapy"
- Equality Act, which would establish protections against discrimination based on an individual's sexual orientation or gender identity in matters of employment, housing, access to public places, federal funding, credit, education, etc.
- rape/rape culture/sexual assault on college campuses
- rape/rape culture/sexual assault in the military
- criminal justice system sentencing guidelines and sexual assault
- gender pay gap
- female reproductive rights
- gender equality and access to education for women and girls
- Female Genital Mutilation (FGM)
- voter rights
- racial justice and the criminal justice system
- ending the use of BMI by the medical/insurance industry
- equal access to nutritionally sound food (food deserts, food insecurity, SNAP, etc.)
- prohibiting fast food companies from marketing to children
- relationship between fashion/media and negative body image/eating disorders
- colonization and the globalization of thin privilege/fatphobia/body shaming
- capitalism and the diet industrial complex