Research practice - due 11/22/11

The reading for next Tuesday is "Does Race Exist," by Bamshad & Olson, in the course reader. However, the blog assignment is not to summarize it. What I'd like you to do instead:

Find at least two good sources that you think you could use in your research paper in some way. For each, quote a single line from it that seems like it might be useful, and provide a full APA citation for it. Then, explain in a short paragraph what the source is - what it contains, how solid a source it is - and how you think you might use it. Here is my example of this:

"Nearly all detective fiction develops through heroes and heroines as protagonists. Generally these heroes combat crime to protect society, to set society aright after the intrusion of a convulsion of law-breaking that has knocked it askew" (Browne, 1988, p. 21).

Browne, R. (1988). The spirit of Australia: the crime fiction of Arthur W. Upfield. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press.

This is for a conference paper I'd like to do in the spring on the mystery writer Arthur Upfield. There aren't a lot of books about his writing out there, and this is the only one the UW system had. It's honestly not that great - there's a weirdly high number of typos, and the whole thing reads more like a fan's work than an actual academic book. But because there are so few books on Upfield, I'm guessing that I should at least acknowledge in my paper that this one exists and that I know what it says about him. I think I can use this quote to talk about the nature of mystery novels and why it's interesting to look at the detective in Upfield's novels as someone who brings justice.

"Doubleday's perceived audience were not American servicemen and their families, or a public newly aware of a distant and previously unfamiliar country. They were dedicated crime fiction buffs always eager to meet new fictional sleuths from different backgrounds, whether cultural or geographic" (Hetherington, 2009, p. 4-5).

Hetherington, C. (2009). Bony at home and abroad: the Arthur Upfield phenomenon. Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature. Special issue. 1-12.

This article is mostly about how people in America have read Upfield's books. I'm happy with how recent it is, because that means it represents some pretty current literary research, though it's a little off-topic for my paper. I still think I can use this quote to talk about how the people publishing Upfield's books - in this case, Doubleday - thought that Upfield should be read. It's interesting that even though I'm saying the most interesting thing about Upfield's novels is that his detective is half-Aboriginal, the publishers just thought it was important that they were good crime novels.