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Practice Module on This File

California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Soka University Japan - Transcend Art and Peace
Created: August 16 2002
Latest Update: August 16, 2002
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

Getting Started

Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individual Authors, August 2002.
"Fair use" encouraged.

This series of essays and practice modules is designed to give you some samples of how a thesis project or an advanced term paper might be done. Not all the Dear Habermas projects will result in theses. They are all in various stages of development and all are related to our work on Dear Habermas. Some will culminate in innovations in Dear Habermas; some will provide the groundwork for future projects.

Berthena Kemp: Our African Heritage

Stage of Thesis Process: Lots of reading. Lots of enthusiastic starts. Need to pull it all together into a project that will enligthen others on the difficulties that beset us in such a project.

Berthena's overriding concern has been to put together a life project that will enable her to change the world to make it a little better. Berthena is in her seventies. She has had a wonderful life full of experience, and she has developed many skills that she would like to pull together to offer something back to the community of the "good life." The problem is, as it is for most of us, finding a single project into which she can throw her energies to bring her project to fruition.

Berthena disappears from school every now and then for a week or so. She's off to a conference or to a special project for teaching women, particularly black women, particularly rural women about survival with breast cancer. But a week or so here and there doesn't satisfy her dream of a life project that would be hers to give to her community. So she is captivated also by a project to work with a local councilwoman on bringing much needed programs to young black children. Berthena is ready to go. But the councilwoman's office is still at the stage of exploring possible sources for grants for the program. Neither the cancer prevention and care program, nor the Congresswoman's program are in any position to pull together our dreams of helping one another.

But a thesis must be written; a topic must be chosen; data must be collected, a thesis completed. Now, that's terribly empirical at a time when positivism is in ill repute, when we have just begun to gain "an understanding of the importance of lay practices and lay beliefs both for philosophy and social analysis. (Anhtony Giddens, Social Theory and Modern Sociology. At p. 59) Those of us who welcome the recognition that sociology is neither physics nor biology, and who refuse to smother our perspective in mathematics, with no attention to lay people, and lay practice, and lay beliefs, offer an alternative. Let's prepare a project in which we collaborate to bring your dreams and your skills, together with some solid theoretical understanding, to help make the world a little better for your community. To give back something of the joy you have had.

Helping to empower rural black women confronting breast cancer is a worthy dream. Helping build programs for young black youth is anotehr worthy dream. Finding a job that might pay you a little for helping, that's a great dream. But the Master's degree wants more. In the Master's thesis we want to see that the student shows sufficient mastery of various theoretical perspectives to plan a small project or study, delimit it (that is, make it doable in a reasonable length of time, with skills that you have or that are available to you), and simply get it done. So this is a practical requirement. We arent' asking you to write a book. We aren't asking you to read to expertise in a given area of sociology. We're just asking you to put into practice what you've learned.

Failure and frustration don't mean that your Thesis Project has failed. Berthena has failed to find a convenient local group in her community with which she could work to make that community better and find enough challenging information for the disciplined collection of data and analysis. But she's worked at, a lot. And shared her frustration with lots of us, and kept struggling in face of the challenge. The sociology project offers a positive spin for that situation.

If everytime you try to do something you encounter a barrier, try, try again. But as W.C.Fields reminded us: Try, try again, but don't make a damn fool of yourself." A little sociological imagination will help you see that maybe what you need to study, what is right here in front of you, are all those variables you've been frustrated by. Why should a senior citizen either undergo the stress of a comprehensive test or write an empirical thesis? What would either of those activities add to her dream?

Remember all the readings we've done about the difficulties of discovering our authentic identities in a context in which we've been dominated. (Link subjective authenticity.) Certainly when we return to school, later in life, we don't have the same goals, the same learning style, the same skills, the same needs we had when we were young. The newest trends in social theory suggest that we focus on the interdependence of social relationships within specific social contexts. A senior citizen who exhibits a great joy in life and who wishes to find a project that will be compatible with those skills, needs to look at what's stopping her as a social problem. If she's stopped by these barriers, so are others. And so I have suggested that Berthena focus her thesis on the difficulty of finding a way to do good.

Just like different ways of knowing, for poor women who have been silenced for most of their lives, there are different ways of helping for those of us who would help, who would do good, who are stopped by a kind of silencing. Sometimes the silencing is openly prejudiced because of our age, or our gender, or our ethnicity, or just whether we're too tall or too squeaky or too aggressive or . . . . . But sometimes the silencing is insidious, the result of power relationships in the community. When the powerful choose to give, they often do so formally, by applying for grants, (and getting them), and by following the dominant discourse of whatever institution or agency is in charge of that kind of helping. So those of us who have no status in such a collective are given short shrift when we offer our time and our skills. We have none of the relevant status symbols, so our time and concern are not worth much. Now that's powerful silencing. And when credit is given, that will also reflect the relational status of power within the group or the community.

Berthena is going to develop her methods and procedures section to clearly indicate all that she has done and what has happened as a result of those efforts.

She will compare that to the things which have been done by groups that do have relational status. Several groups with which she has worked that have programs in Africa. She is fascinated by her African Heritage. She wants desperately to help. And yet little has come of those efforts. Just as little has come of our efforts to connect with Landless Corners in Zambia to build relationships between our communities. Good people have tried to help, but still little comes of it.

In her thesis project Berthena will tell the stories of these efforts, of what has kept our motivation alive, and of the frustrations we have all experienced with the vague sense of "wanting to help." Our ability to help depends almost directly on our relational status within some institutional or agency system. Yet institutions and agencies function with people just like us. Berthena will be looking at her own actual attempts to help the community, and those that we have shared with her. But Dear Habermas will go past that to the identification of authenticities in subjectivities, the extent to which relational statuse in organizations interfere with those authenticities, and with ways of transforming the social context in which that occurs. Berthena' thesis focuses on one way in which we can transform that social context, by bringing it to awareness, not just for ourselves, but as Maria Pia Lara insists, by our demand for recognition of our voices.

Now, in order to illustrate how we write, I want to present two of Berthena's submissions on her thesis. These submissions refer to problems that occured and some of the work she did in the summer, while I was travelling.

I'm Frustrated Again

From August 15, 2002. e-mail - First submission:

From: Berthena Kemp
Date: Fri, 16 Aug 2002
Subject: My Thesis
To: jeannecurran@habermas.org

Jeanne I am glad you are back! Have you received any of my e mails? I have been involved with the African group at my church. I will be working with Millie Coulter at the library this thurs. I am having a problem with the library checking out books because I lost my card. There seems to be a problem I hope to get it straight soon Jeanne I tried to locate the credit from last semester with you. can you help me find it?

From August 15, 2002. e-mail - Second submission

"From: Berthena Kemp
Date: Fri, 16 Aug 2002
Subject: My African relationship
To: jeannecurran@habermas.org

My concerns toward building a relationship with people from Africa led me to join an African Fellowship at my church. I must say I was intimidated at first. Although we shared the same faith I found we differed in our relationship toward each other.

The couple that are the leaders of the fellowship I would guess are in their mid fifties or late forties. Which means they are several years my junior. He is a local school teacher, and his wife is in the health care profession. When I arrived at the meeting the room was bustling with families with children scrambling in line to be served dinner before the meeting was started. I finally cornered the female leader of the group and said that If it was at all possible i would like to become a part of the group. She smiled and told me quite crisply that the fellowship was especially geared for people from the African continent who shared the self same problems adjusting to life in this country. For instance the guest speaker for the afternoon was an attorney from Africa who was proficient in helping those with green card problems.

She told me if I chose I could remain. She even offered me a plate for dinner. I accepted, however, I was rather reluctant about staying, as I did not feel the welcome mat.

I decided to bite the bullet and apporached one smartly dressed woman, sitting all alone, for a bit of conversation and to share my admiration for her beautiful white African dress with matching head dress. I had this in mind as I approached her but a few minutes into the conversation, I got the distinct impression that she did not want to be bothered.

After thinking it over I wonder if my insides were hung all out, that they made me feel as I did?

Jeanne's Comments:

Hi, Berthena. Glad to be back. I'll just bet you were frustrated. I hope you find your library card. But you did the right thing in joining another student so you could continue to have access. I'll be glad to help you straighten out your credit for last semester.

Now, as to your work this summer. Gee, I'm glad it wasn't me at that dinner. I liked your last comment, "what was hanging out that they made me feel like that." Despite the discomfort and hesitation you described, you had the presence to identify the status relationships.

• Solidarity based upon coming from Africa.
• Age differences - 40s as compared to 70s
• Professional status - Did you remind them that you were getting an M.A?
  Did you remind you?