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The purpose of this assignment is to reflect on your work so far and to think through how you might define your early research questions and focus your project. It is also intended to help other students coordinate their research goals in relation to your own, so try to make the relevance and uniqueness of your project as clear as possible and avoid repeating things you have previously shared in class conversations. This is the first part of your project proposal and should show how far your preliminary research has helped you to develop your research questions.Read the responses to Class Conversation 3.2, review the CP assignment prompt, and then freewrite 500-1000 words responding to any of the following prompts:How have your questions, search keywords, and understandings evolved over the last few weeks as a result of your ongoing research, reading, and class conversations?What sources have you found helpful in making sense of the subject matter in this class? Have these sources led you to potentially interesting and urgent research questions? Explain.Do you have a specific social problem you know you want to learn more about? If so, what do you already know about it? How can you define it more narrowly to make it more manageable? If not, brainstorm some different possibilities in relation to previous class conversations.What do you know you do not want to focus on? Set some limits to your interests, even if they are only for the short term. You can always learn more from other scholars’ work or after this project is over. Do you notice any other students taking up questions that you won’t need to answer? What are some research questions you will set aside for now to sharpen your focus on others?What points of contention (exp

licitly recognized or not) in the previous class conversations interest you most? Discuss what is at stake for you in developing an argument for one position or another regarding such points of contention. How can you frame your interest and sense of these stakes as research questions (rather than settled answers)?Discuss the scale (space and time, geographical and historical) at which you would want to analyze your chosen social problem (whether or not it has been well defined yet). What human actors, institutions, and social-economic processes are most influential at that scale, as far as you know?Can you provide a description of the present situation that you find to be a problem? What evidence can you provide from the present moment that attention is required? For whom is the situation more or less urgent? How is the situation produced in relation to other less problematic situations (e.g. how is the disadvantage dynamically connected to advantage)?If you have some idea of how you want to define your social problem, what do you know about the rhetorical situation surrounding it? How do public commentators discuss it? How do professional scholars discuss it?What personal connection can you draw upon to motivate your research and demonstrate your authentic interest in your topic? What ethical stakes do you consider your research to have?What else do you think about your research at this stage? Use your writing here to work through any aspect of you work, open questions, confusions, frustrations, speculative ideas, etc.NOTE: Writing you submit for these topic development posts can be used as draft portions of your CP, to be included with necessary revisions if and when it is appropriate to the development of the argument therein.