Reference no: EM133296150

Bourgois, Philippe "Useless Suffering: The war on homeless drug addicts"

1. Who is the author? What kind of disciplinary background are they coming from (e.g., anthropology, history, sociology, medicine)? Who is it written for? How can you infer the audience?

2. What methods were used in collecting data? (Ethnography, interviews, statistics, textual analysis, archival research? Does the data look at what people do, say, or think? How was the data analyzed?

3. What is the article about empirically? In other words, what is being studied as the object? Where are the events and people geographically situated? What is the scale of analysis? (e.g., nation, city, region, institution, person)? When did the study take place?

4. What is the main goal of the writing? - to verify something? Or challenge a theoretical claim? In other words, if you had to explain it in class, how would you summarize it?

5. Identify the author's thesis. What are the key concepts used? Are concepts challenged or invented?

6. Discuss a passage (citing page number) that inspired you or frustrated you. Then type out a paragraph or two (160-300 words) discussing that passage (citing page number) and describing how it resonated or clashed with other course content (which might be a discussion, a film, or another text).

7. If you take one thing away from the text, what would it be? In other words, if you are telling a friend about this article, what's the one nugget you would share to start a conversation?

8. Create one discussion question for class.