Post the Introduction of Your Most Recent Paper

[HagridOfTheDeep]

I'm just starting a paper that I'm getting really into, and it made me curious about some of the things all of you are exploring in your academic lives...

So why not encourage people to give a little sampler, hm? I'll post mine shortly, but I don't wanna go first, haha. Maybe this is a stupid thread, but what the heck!

[Хahar 🤔]

I haven't written a paper in a while, since all my coursework is math-related now. The last paper I wrote was my history honors thesis, back in the spring of 2015. I apologize for the writing, which is rather turgid because I churned out the whole thing in a week. I enjoy talking about this subject but it's a bit embarrassing to go back and look at what I actually wrote.
In American popular discourse, the Cold War is framed as a bilateral confrontation between monolithic and diametrically opposed blocs, represented by the United States and the Soviet Union. The term “Cold War” itself demonstrates this worldview, as it suggests that relations between capitalist and communist states in the decades following the Second World War were merely a military struggle pursued by other means. To the extent that a place in the narrative exists for other states involved in the Cold War, such as the communist states of Eastern Europe, they are merely satellite states and accessories in the worldwide struggle. This view was actively encouraged by communist propagandists, who sought to present a united socialist front to the world. However, scholarship since the end of Eastern European communism has shown that the notion that Eastern European states were complacent Soviet puppets fails to reflect the truth from an economic standpoint, as communist rule in Eastern Europe led not to Soviet economic exploitation of the region but rather to those states making gains at the expense of Moscow. The eventual breakup of Eastern European communism did not occur in a vacuum, as even during the Cold War each independent communist state acted first and foremost in its own self-interest. Furthermore, the assumption that Westerners during the Cold War simply viewed Eastern Europe as a communist monolith masks the nuances of the relationship of the American media and public opinion with the states of Eastern Europe. Americans could and did distinguish between friendly states and hostile states even among the Soviet bloc, as shown by the contrasting examples of East Germany and Romania.

[HagridOfTheDeep]

That sounds super interesting, Xahar. Like, it actually seems like a real paper. I write super flakey stuff. Here's something I did last April.


   According to Edward Wilson, the American zoologist who coined the term, “biophilia” describes “the innate human urge to affiliate with other forms of life,” both flora and fauna, in the natural sphere. Biophilia, then, seems to be a string that connects people with place. Unsurprisingly, it is often encoded in “myths, religions, art, rituals, songs, and dances.” Although scholars like Gregory Cajete most often identify biophilia in Indigenous cultural expressions, I bring up the term here, at the start of an essay on wilderness and its role in Canadian citizenship, because biophilia—or, at least, an appropriated, manipulated, and political form of biophilia—has obviously become a foundational part of the Canadian story through similar means.

   A recent trip to the local movie theatre confirmed this fact for me when the pre-show advertisements started to roll and I was treated to a particularly moving spot from Parks Canada. Accompanied by stirring music, the ad cycles through a number of short scenes: a man and woman walk their bikes up to the shoreline of a picturesque lake; a family of hikers looks out at the stunning mountain vistas; a mother and child enjoy an empty beach; friends have a musical jam session on the Canadian Shield. In a nod to biophilia and its constructed place in Canadian citizenship, the narrator embraces the wilderness as a place that provides “time to connect with nature.” Even more notable is the way he urges viewers to “find [their] red chair moment” as each of the actors settles in to enjoy Canada’s landscape from the comfort of a bright red Muskoka chair. The chair, it seems, represents the real Canada. Becoming a real Canadian thus requires sitting down in that metaphorical chair and interacting with the wilderness in a very particular way. But what happens when barriers, real or imagined, dissuade or prevent Canadians from accessing that chair? What does it mean for their place in Canada?


I didn't even get to my formal thesis statement there, lol. But you get the gist.

[Crumpets]

My last paper was a 72-page thesis with a 12-page introduction, so I'll just post the bit where I make my main argument:

    Given that the prospects of Belarusian-Russian integration have become increasingly unlikely in recent decades and the growing nationalist sentiments in other post-Soviet states, we would expect to find that political groups in Belarus would promote a Belarusian identity grounded in a Belarus which is fully independent for the foreseeable future. Instead, we find that both pro-government and opposition movements retain narratives based on a collective Soviet Belarusian identity and still portray further integration with Russia as an imminent possibility. Why?

    I argue that the outdated assumptions about Belarus’s relationship with Russia found in its political narratives are used by their promulgators to appeal to a populace with a shared traumatic memory of the Soviet collapse. To cope with this traumatic memory, there is an ongoing subconscious adherence to antiquated notions of Belarusian identity as a “Soviet¹” nation and Russia as a savior of the Belarusian people, albeit one which has had its legitimacy largely corrupted due to its abandonment of truly “Soviet” principles in the wake of the collapse. This process of identity construction is reflected in an implicit adherence to shared schemata and tropes used by both pro-government and anti-government groups in their public political discourse. I shall use examples of such discourse to demonstrate this ongoing effort to cope with the Soviet collapse and show that this phenomenon is not isolated to a single group, region, or political agenda, but rather a shared experience throughout Belarus.

¹ In this paper, the term “Soviet” will be used to refer both to the USSR as well as to the institutions, norms, and ideals associated with it. When someone refers to Belarus as a “Soviet” nation, they do not mean to say that the USSR still exists as a sovereign state and never collapsed, but that they see Belarus as a state which exemplifies the ideals for which it stood, and they see those ideals as alive and well in the world today. Note that this does not mean Marxism-Leninsism explicitly, but more vague notions of Soviet rightness and legitimacy.

[Mr. Smith]

If I can still access my old college email, I'll see what I can do.

It's just a literary and thematic analysis of Southern Romanticism.

[muon2]

My most recent as a coauthor was submitted Aug 2016 to Physical Review D:

Measurement of the direct CP violating charge asymmetry in B^±→μ^±ν_μD⁰ decays

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[MASHED POTATOES. VOTE!]

You poor bastards don't know my beautiful national language

[rpryor03]

In City of Stone: The Hidden History of Jerusalem, Meron Benvenisti describes how “the chronicles of Jerusalem are a gigantic quarry from which each side has mined stones for the constructions of its myths - and for throwing at each other.” Nationalist movements in the area that is known as “Israel,” such as the Zionists and the Palestinian Liberation Organization, have consistently used historical artifacts and resources to prove their primacy as the original people that lived in the Judean Mountains.

[JerryArkansas]

Hell, it is something all people know about.  However, where did the modern idea of hell come from?  Dante, in his masterpiece Paradise Lost, provided a description which many know as hell.  John Milton, in Paradise Lost also gave a description which still lingers in the collective mind. But they are very different from each other. In Inferno and Paradise Lost, a clash exists between the descriptions, due in large part to the hardships and struggles that the authors of the works had faced in life before and during writing them. Milton would face struggles regarding not only his health but the civil war which was raging in England at the time.  Dante had to face losing his home and the betrayal of all those who he had known best.  These hardships lead them to giving a description of hell that scars us to this day.

It sucks, but did the job.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Dante, in his masterpiece Paradise Lost,

Please tell me you just mistyped here and didn't actually write that on your paper.

[World politics is up Schmitt creek]

I'm writing this one paper really haphazardly and out of order so I'll just post the part I wrote first, which is actually being relegated to a footnote.

The Face of the Deep at times has the same insight and brooding vigor as Rossetti’s poetry at its best (“Goblin Market,” “When I am dead, my dearest”), which stands as a shining example of the Romantic-Gothic-Victorian aesthetic complex of representational non-realism that with a few exceptions such as Austen dominated English literature between Coleridge and Henry James; at other times it has the flabby morbidity of her poetry at its worst (Rossetti produced enough poetry to fill almost nine hundred pages in the Penguin Classics edition, meaning that some of her poems are bound to be stinkers). The theology expressed in it is fascinating but justly a bit repellent to current sensibilities—at one point a generally insightful and semi-sympathetic analysis of the figure of Eve turns into a meditation on womanhood that gives the Blessed Virgin Mary her Catholic prominence but her Protestant passivity. In the face of The Face of the Deep we must reread aspects of Rossetti’s poetry like the plea for female solidarity in “Goblin Market,” or the intimations of same-sex longing there and elsewhere, in the light of an over-idealized feminine centered on conventional Victorian values like patience and softness, and only secondarily if at all on the sort of intellectual and aesthetic exploration that characterized Rossetti’s own life and activities and that she represents to later feminist interpreters.

[Antonio the Sixth]

My papers' intros usually take up several pages, so I can't post an entire one, but here are the first two paragraphs of one I wrote last June (and got an A+ for).

By ending the systematic disenfranchisement and institutional discrimination faced by African-Americans in the South and elsewhere, the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s fundamentally reshaped American society. Far from only affecting the condition of Black citizens, this transformative event has had significant repercussions on White attitudes and behavior as well. In the political sphere, in particular, it led to a reconfiguration of the partisan divide along the lines of the conflict over racial policy (Carmines & Stimson 1989). The most striking manifestation of this political realignment was the collapse of the Democratic party in the South, where it once dominated. However, the irruption of racial issues as a driver of White voters’ political attitudes and partisan identities concerned the entire country. The impact of this process on U.S. politics is as potent today as it was in 1980, when Ronald Reagan voiced support for States’ Rights during a speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi. At the elite level as much as in the mass electorate, Republicans have with increasing consistency expressed reluctance toward policy initiatives favoring African-Americans, while Democrats have near-unanimously championed such proposals.

This continued salience of racial issues in the political debate seems in contradiction with the modern consensus in favor of racial equality among the White public. Opinion surveys have documented that, over the past fifty years, belief in the inferiority of African-Americans and support for explicitly racist policies have declined steadily, and, by the 1990s, were confined to a small subset of the White public (Schuman et al. 1997, p. 99-195). If almost all Americans profess to share the fundamental goals of the Civil Rights movement, why do modern debates on racial issues remain highly contentious and politically charged? The most compelling explanation offered by social psychologists to resolve this apparent paradox resides in the concept of “symbolic racism”. First laid out by Sears and Kinder (1971), the theory of symbolic racism argues that traditional racist beliefs are no longer the main drivers of White hostility toward African-Americans. In their stead, a new form of prejudice has taken hold among a large segment of the White public, which reformulates a deep-seated aversion toward Blacks in the language of American individualism and work ethic (Sears & Henry 2005). The measure of symbolic racism developed by these scholars has consistently proven to be the best predictor of voters’ positions on racially charged issues and attitudes toward African-American candidates, outperforming both ideological indicators and “old-school” racist attitudes.