One challenge of refining your selections for our Remembering Roe memory project is to anchor your theme topic of particular memory.
The task of your research at this stage is to focus your inquiry to locate the particular anchor that embodies its significance and serves a central site/vehicle through which the impact of Roe v. Wade and the history and practices it represents has been remembered.
This might seem too narrow but a defined focus will allow the specificity of your selected research site to serve as a prism for revealing the issues of your larger topic in an applied way. It will also empower you with a more targeted process of research. To do this you should read more broadly in your topic, take notes, and develop a list of increasingly focused keywords – revealed to you in your research — than can unlock other instances of how your memory circulates.
- Find useable particulars within your larger memory topic by defining its focus into specific instances and see which ones provide the most telling angles for more focused analysis.
- Don’t rely only on search engines to find materials for your site!!
- Define a varied list of specific keywords for your site and use them in different combinations to find useful materials in the databases on UNC’s library webpage and begin with an Article+ search. https://library.unc.edu/find/articles/
- Look up, using your specific keywords, how your site has been covered in the media (with what different keywords) by seeking out local newspapers in the America’s News database which can be searched at the State level. Use this database (but you will need very focused keywords)!
- Use different combinations of your focused keywords to search in Google scholar: http://scholar.google.com/ when you find a good source, click on the “Cited by” link to see more recent research that used this article
- Full-text databases beyond the ones mentioned above that might prove especially useful include Academic Search Premier, Proquest Central, OCLC Firstsearch, and Proquest Dissertations and Thesis, as well as JSTOR and Project Muse. You can find links to these on the right side of this page. Check out the databases under Women’s and Gender Studies.
- Seek out visual, sound, and multimedia representations of your topic and site.
- What important contexts do you need to consider to be able to interpret your “site”? (For example, when did it originate and out of what previous memories? Who established it, invented it, and belongs for it? How is it maintained? Who accesses it and how is it used? Who benefits from it? Why has it become popular and representative?)
- What kind of conflict and significance is represented by your “site”?
- It will be key to argue in your research post how your site is connected to Roe v. Wade and serves as a vehicle for the cultural memories associated with it.
- Look for how your “site” may have served as a rally point around which other memory work has accreted and ways that your site has circulated through and influenced other spaces and forms of memory. A measure of the impact and importance of a “site” is how it circulates in popular reference and expression.
- Think of how your site meets Zelizer’s premises of being material, particular/universal, unpredictable, processual, useable, and partial (and Schudson’s distortions) and consider how your site embodies these aspects of memory as well as other concepts from our course.