Encounters in contact zones
This is how my professor wants it. it is a compare and contrast paper.
Begin the paper with an address to your audience. Your audience is a group of scholars who are familiar with Mary Louise Pratt’s ideas on contact zones. You will be informing the reader about how power is abused in small, seemly innocent ways before a violent genocide. You will be arguing about how social practices emerge more out of cultural attitudes inherent in populations than out of the encounters themselves. This prepares your audience for your main idea about the cultural frame that influences the encounter.
Next, write the main Idea
Begin with your main thesis. Next, briefly summarize how you will prove your thesis by proposing the differences you see between Columbus and the Amerindians in relation to trade, religion, and language.
Definition Paragraph
Define a contact zone by paraphrasing Mary Louise Pratt’s ideas in her essay Imperial Eyes. Make sure you cover her main points. Begin with her strongest point and then add how she supports that idea. This paragraph on Pratt should be about four sentences on how she is defining her terms.
Section Headings:
Next, write out the 3 main topic sentences that will guide the reader through your expanded thesis in the body of the paper. These statements are ideas rather than descriptions, summaries, and examples. As such they are usually written in complex sentences.
In a compare/contrast essay the usual thesis statement / topic sentence structure takes the form of explicitly stating differences. What they have in common is the topics we are comparing: Trade, religion, and language.
You want your sentences to be in parallel logic.
Your three main topic sentences in this case would be about how the Zuni approach trade, religion, and language by being open to experience which you would name in a specific way in each section
Reflection: The last paragraph of the paper will be a consideration of the way we witness micro-aggressions in social practices today. Be specific. Focus on your own experience and step through a process that you have witnessed to see the way these encounters can be handled skillfully to avoid escalations. What kind of preparation informs the participants to help them avoid normalizing an unstable practice? Think about the work place, social interactions, seller/buyer trades, or classroom practices. Do a close reading of an experience.
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